Article:
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.
Thoughts:This application is similar to a search engine, it gathers sorts and collates all relative information on a given topic. This could prove very useful for research collating all possible references in one place. How does this technology work? How is the information organised for easy consumption? Does it work like the book search at your local library searching for key words, subjects etc. How does it deal with inaccurate information or repetitive information. Has potential for use in the architectural world. There is a very large amount of architecturtal data online and it would be helpful to have an easier way to serch through the mountain of information to find what you are looking for.