Social Media Research Blog

Life in Seattle

NO, I haven't forgotten about this blog....just that moving out of school, settling in a new city and a new job has kept me busy all this while. I did manage to spend some time back home which is always the best thing ever. I am in Seattle now and absolutely love it here. Although it has just been a few weeks working at Live Labs, Microsoft is fantastic! There is a ton of cool stuff happening here and I am learning something new everyday, interacting with some amazing folks and admiring the fact that there is so much happening here!

I have also been able to take a step back and think about how I would like to share my thoughts on this blog. It is great that there is a good deal of freedom at Microsoft regarding blogging. But with that is also a responsibility and a disclaimer that I must emphasize: "Any thoughts expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or people who I work with."

I will soon be back to regular posting...

Live Labs Social Streams

Very cool! Live Labs releases the Political Streams project. It is a lense into the people and places that are receiving a lot of attention on blogs and news.

You can read the post snippet and see neat graphs of how the attention changes over time:

Also browse through the related names and places as you explore different topics and blog posts/news stories. Furthermore there are profiles of people and places in news that are generated using Freebase.

 

This is really cool! If you looked at search trends, many of the search terms are in fact about places and people in News. Users go to a search engine to find out both why they are in news? and often who the person is? Social streams (right now, for political streams) let you explore this in a real time, interactive manner. 

Nice!