New From Live Labs: Political Streams

sarahintampa — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:56:00 GMT

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.

Live.com - Your FriendFeed Search Engine

sarahintampa — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:59:00 GMT

Being somewhat of a FriendFeed addict myself, this story on SEO and Tech Daily caught my eye: "Live.com Heavily Indexing FriendFeed." If you haven't already heard about FriendFeed (where have you been?), it's the hot new lifestreaming aggregation service that lets you keep tabs on all of your friends' activities on the social web. In one continuous stream of information, you can see when they post to their post, share a video on YouTube, add a picture to flickr, Digg a story, and much more from an ever-growing list of services. What's great about FriendFeed is that all your friends don't have to be on the service for you to enjoy using it - you have the ability to create "imaginary" friends if you know your friend's username on the service(s) you want to follow.

So, back to the blog post. What blogger Charlie Anzman noticed was that an ego-search (when you search for yourself on a search engine) on Live.com returned FriendFeed results for both the #1 and #2 spots. No one else seems to be doing that yet. I think this is great since finding someone on FriendFeed will quickly get you to their social network profiles where you can find out more about them. Of course, if that person if well known enough to have a Wikipedia page or something more official, those results would get ranked higher, but FriendFeed still has a strong showing.

It looks like I'll be people searching on Live.com from now on!

Entries tagged with social media - Channel 10

New From Live Labs: Political Streams

Live.com - Your FriendFeed Search Engine