Entries tagged with politics - Channel 10

xRank Politician Updated

sarahintampa — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:09:00 GMT

The Live Search team has just updated their xRank site’s special U.S. election feature with new information. Now, xRank Politician includes all the candidates running for president, governor, and congress. On the site, you can compare the search trends for opposing candidates to see who’s being searched for more often. There’s also biographical info on the candidates, links to news stories, photos and videos on each candidate’s page. You can click on the thumbnails of the videos to play them right on the site, too, just like in Live Search News – you don’t have to leave the page. Some interesting findings so far – Sarah Palin is searched for far more often than Joe Biden, but Obama and McCain are neck-and-neck.

New From Live Labs: Political Streams

sarahintampa — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:56:00 GMT

The Live Labs team has just released a new project, Political Streams, and just in time as the U.S. Presidential election draws near. The site mines social media from across the internet, including blogs, newsgroups, and web sites, in order to track what stories are popular and if that popularity is increasing or decreasing.

When you click into an article on Political Streams, you’ll see a snippet of text from the article’s start and a link to the source if you’re interested in reading the complete story. Beneath this text are charts and graphs that show the attention the people and places mentioned in that particular story have seen over time. On the right, you’ll also see links to related information like other articles on news sites and blogs as well as links to people and places. Those people and places are generated by leveraging the API from the online open database project, Freebase.

The Political Streams site was built on the Social Streams platform, a platform that mines the social web for data. BLEWS, an earlier project by Microsoft Research, was also built on this platform.

Election News Comes To Media Center

sarahintampa — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:59:00 GMT

A recent post on the Windows Vista Blog provides info on a great new resource for Media Center PC users just in time for the vice-presidential debates tonight: Election News! Under the TV + Movies section in Media Center, you’ll now see a new title called MSNBC News Beta. This title will be available to Vista Home Premium and Ultimate users in the U.S. and Canada.

Here, you’ll find a selection of MSNBC’s top stories and weather listings, including Editor’s Picks and Most Popular videos. Under the Politics section, there’s a category for “Decision ‘08” where videos pertaining to the current U.S. Presidential elections will be displayed. As you browse through the videos, you may notice a plus sign “+” appears when you click on a video. Using this plus sign, you can create your own custom news video playlist which you can play back any time you want. There’s nothing to download to start using this new feature so you can simply begin using it the next time you run Media Center.

New Vista Sidebar Gadgets Let Your Track The Elections

sarahintampa — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:48:00 GMT

Are you a political junkie? Here in the U.S. it's hard not to be when it's election season. With so much going on - rallies, debates, and economic crises - it seems that the poll numbers change every day. Now you don't have to wait on the news to give you the latest info from the presidential polls - you can just look at your desktop. The new Gallup Poll Vista gadget lets you obsessively watch the Gallup daily election polling numbers to see who's ahead on a day-to-day basis. And the new Election Countdown gadget will count down to the next important political event in the presidential election calendar, including all three Presidential debates, the Vice Presidential debate (which is tonight) as well as Elections day and Inauguration Day. The gadgets are non-partisan and include links to both Obama and McCain's web sites. The countdown gadget can be themed with either Obama or McCain skins, too. What great finds!

Rock the Vote From Your Xbox

sarahintampa — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:39:00 GMT

Xbox and Rock the Vote have partnered up in order to reach out to young voters through the Xbox community. Starting August 25th – the same day as the first day of the Democratic National Convention - Xbox 360 owners will be able to register to vote, participate in presidential polls, and voice their opinions to the presidential candidates through Xbox LIVE, a community whose members reach 12 million. Said Heather Smith, executive director, Rock the Vote: “To realize our goal of registering 2 million young Americans by this fall, we need to go where young Americans are, and there’s no doubt in our minds that many are on Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE.”

I remember in the past Rock the Vote was involved with MTV, but I don’t ever remember seeing them actually go seek out young voters through a gaming platform before – that is definitely a first. And how creative! I went and checked out the Rock the Vote homepage to see where else they were besides Xbox, and it turns out that they’re on YouTube, facebook, and flickr, too. (Hmm, someone should tell them about Twitter.)

Obama Deep Zoom

Larry — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Donavon West, a regular on Channel 9 and also the man behind HomeServerHacks.com, has created a gigapixel Deep Zoom from Obama supporter thumbnails - 12,000 to be exact, spread across a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel photo of Barack Obama. Some of the images are higher res than others (higher res images seem to stand out a little more than the others even at a distance), check out the high res photo on his left eye.

See more at DeepZoomObama.com

TechFest 2008: BLEWS - What the Blogosphere Tells You About News

Tina — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:59:00 GMT

What a great time for BLEWS...while blogging about politics is at an all-time high, BLEWS simplifies the debates for you...here's what I found out at TechFest 2008.

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.

BLEWS also offers a “see the view from the other side” functionality, enabling a reader to compare different views on the same story from different sides of the political spectrum. BLEWS achieves this goal by digesting and analyzing a real-time feed of political-blog posts provided by the Live Labs Social Media platform, adding both link analysis and text analysis of the blog posts.

Left vs. Right

sarahintampa — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 06:00:00 GMT

A new Live Search promotional site, Left vs. Right, has been launched. The site features two new anchors, left-leaning "Patrick O'Neil" and right-wing "Britt Hayes," who represent both sides of the political spectrum. In the middle of the page is a search box which will perform Live Search queries. When you type in a keyword or question in the search box, the two characters will began a humorous discussion or debate about the topic. Or perhaps just insult each other. Even if you don't type anything in, the characters will begin a funny skit. Hilarious time-waster! (via Inside Microsoft)

Politics and Blogging - Does it matter?

Tina — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:28:00 GMT

I'm sitting in my living room watching the results to the New Hampshire primary and earlier this evening it was projected pretty early on that John McCain would take the top spot among the Republicans. And Hillary Clinton just finished giving her speech as the winning Democrat. I have a love for politics and the history of it, although truthfully I don't know a ton about it. I do know however that running for political office these days must be drastically strategically different then even eight years ago. With MySpace, facebook, blogs and youtube, information and therefore opinions have a significantly different way of traveling these days. The scary part is sometimes you don't know when a candidate is actually behind a site or not. I've been asked by a few people myself about my personal myspace page. I don't have a myspace page. I'm not a myspacer. But somebody has created a page and pretends to be me. Why? I have no idea. I wonder how many fake sites have been created about some of the current political candidates. About a year ago I went to listen to John Edwards speak, he came to Seattle to chat with bloggers and ask questions about blogging for his campaign this year. I respected him for doing that. Here's the link if you're interested. Anyway, there actually is a point to the post. I'm just curious how you think blogging and the internet has changed the way we look at politics? And if there was one candidate you think would be playing Xbox live, which candidate and which game?

Stem cells: clumps, broth, and chick emryos

Laura — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:00:00 GMT

In the conclusion of our foray into the universe of stem cell research, we take a closer look at what grows out of stem cells. Dr. Murry's team brought us under the microscope to get a closer look at how different types of stem cells develop into particular components of our favorite rodents.

We also get a close look at what sort of mad science can be done with chick embryos. Our sunny side up order in the Microsoft Cafe 16 won't ever look the same again.

Links: Dr. Chuck Murry, Microsoft Cafe 16, Stem Cells - Part 1

Stem cells: Everything you ever wanted to know, but with rodents

Laura — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 21:30:00 GMT

In what has quickly become as hotly contested an issue as abortion, stem cell research is an area where it never hurts to go over the facts. Dr. Chuck Murry from UW Medicine handed out the latex gloves and layed out the stem cell crash course.

We here at 10 are always looking for ways to enhance your dinner table conversation, and after this two part series (they said it couldn't be done) you'll be able to impress your dining companions by appearing as though you looked at something other than the RSS tsunami today.

Links: Dr. Chuck Murry, Stem Cell Research, UW Medicine