Political streaming

What's in a name? Web 2.0 and the internet in general has a habbit of renaming - in this case web statistics measuring news and blogs is called "political streaming". As someone who enjoys reading data and information graphically rather than textualy, "Political Streams" is a great find. The process of organising information on "news" and "blogs" is called "mining".

It mines information from all the blogs and Web sites out there, and all on one screen, lets you see the relative popularity of any given story, whether it’s trending up or down, and tracks the number of mentions of the people and places mentioned in the story.

For example you can check the level of news and blog stories on Obama over the past week or alternatively you can check the data on a particular story such as Obama's choice of Chief of Staff. The only downside is not enough news / blog stories are covered. I thought that clicking on Africa, I would be taken to a set of news / blog stories on Africa but instead I got a separate page with some basic geographic information on Africa with no further inks to explore so not really very useful.

Another similar graphic presentation is BLEWS by Microsoft.

While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps.

What amuses me about both these visual presentations of information which "Unthinkingly calls "infoviz" (not sure if he coined the word or its one in general use) is the language used to describe the processes and structure. Words like consume, mining, emotional charge, digesting end up making you feel as if you are dealing with something live rather than an inanimate object on a flat screen.

If visual information is your thing then you can find more at Unthinkingly under "infoviz"