Social Streams
Social Streams is a Live Labs project whose mission is to aggregate, store and mine all social media content. The Social Streams Platform has been used to support a number of applications and research efforts, and to date we have made one of these applications – Political Streams – available to the public.
Political Streams was released for a limited period of time around the 2008 US Presidential Election. The goal was to provide, at a glance, the stories (both in the news and social media) which were attracting the most attention. In addition, using text mining technologies and structured data, the application surfaced the people and places associated with those stories.
Political Streams made the cut for a number of lists tracking the best sites for understanding the election including LifeHacker’s Top 10 Web Tools for Election Season and The Industry Standard’s Top 20 Election Day Web Sites.
Microsoft Research’s BLEWS project is another example of an application built on the platform. This project not only looked at political stories in the blogosphere, but also analyzed the number of links to those stories from known liberal or conservative weblogs and showed a graphical representation of those links.