A new project from Microsoft Research (who by the way, is doing the coolest things these days), is a social search experiment called U Rank. The current U Rank prototype is a social search engine built on Live Search that lets you organize, edit, and annotate your search results as well as share them with others.

Essentially, the way U Rank works is by letting you move the search results around – either higher or lower using drag-and-drop while also optionally adding notes to the results or deleting them entirely. In other words, you can create the perfect, personalized search results instead of relying on an algorithm to do it for you.

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The Live Labs team has just released a new project, Political Streams, and just in time as the U.S. Presidential election draws near. The site mines social media from across the internet, including blogs, newsgroups, and web sites, in order to track what stories are popular and if that popularity is increasing or decreasing.

When you click into an article on Political Streams, you’ll see a snippet of text from the article’s start and a link to the source if you’re interested in reading the complete story. Beneath this text are charts and graphs that show the attention the people and places mentioned in that particular story have seen over time. On the right, you’ll also see links to related information like other articles on news sites and blogs as well as links to people and places. Those people and places are generated by leveraging the API from the online open database project, Freebase.

The Political Streams site was built on the Social Streams platform, a platform that mines the social web for data. BLEWS, an earlier project by Microsoft Research, was also built on this platform.

A new project from Office Labs has just been unveiled: Touchless, a multitouch software app and SDK that lets you create and experience multi-touch applications of your own...with no need for expensive hardware or software. The way it does that is with the use of a standard computer webcam and colored markers that are defined by the user. These “markers” can be anything you want – just so long as you can hold them in your hands. Or, heck, the markers can even be your fingers themselves.

Sound familiar? Probably because it’s very much like Cam-Trax, which I mentioned earlier this year.  The difference is that unlike Cam-Trax, with Touchless there is an open source application and SDK available, which anyone can see, use, and contribute to. (Video after the jump)

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