October 9, 2008
By Elizabeth Montalbano

Just as the U.S. enters the last weeks of a heated presidential campaign, Microsoft's Live Labs group has launched a Web-based application that offers up what it considers to be the political articles and documents getting the most recent attention and discussion among Web users.

The Live Labs Political Streams application, according to Microsoft, "mines social media content in real time for political discussion," according to a site listing facts about the application. Political Streams gathers data from blogs, Usenet newsgroups and Freebase, an open, shared online database, to highlight news articles and documents that are getting the most attention from -- and generating the most discussion among -- Web users, according to Microsoft.

It also showcases information about people and places in those articles. "This related information gives a broader context, allowing the user to understand how both the mainstream and social media are discussing an issue, person or place," Microsoft said on the site. Political Streams is built on top of Social Streams, another Live Labs project that indexes social media from around the Web that is found on blogs, newsgroups, discussions and news sites.

Formed about two years ago, Live Labs is Microsoft's research arm for creating new Internet technologies. The company created it in response to Google and other Web 2.0 companies that, unencumbered by Microsoft's size and software legacy, are able to create and release new Web-based applications faster than Microsoft could otherwise do.