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Political Streams is a tool that can be used to track news stories from blogs and popular news sites, and also uses ranking based on velocity and overall coverage. Microsoft’s Live Labs team came out with this service to introduce a new way to track political discourse on the Web, an ease of access for people looking for latest news and headlines related to politics.

An added feature here is that the site also keeps track of mentioned names & places, just to show the coverage that the ‘topic’ has received within the last 30 days.

Users can check out each item in detail; available to them is a small one-paragraph summary, and two charts for coverage of people & places. The information on the service is brought forth from Freebase, the Wikipedia-like open database project, and much like Google’s Blog Search, Live Lab’s Political Streams keeps track of how long a story has been followed. It captures the first time it began getting tracked through the service’s crawling engine.

Additional streams’ pages are sure to be added soon, for tech, world, sports and celebrity news, although after the presidential election.