What do people on the political right search for? And which queries concerning “tea party” are most left-wing? Now Yahoo! has a demo where you can find out: http://politicalinsights.sandbox.yahoo.com/.

This application is the first public presentation of the work I’ve been doing together with Ingmar Weber at the Yahoo! labs in Barcelona. The current demo employs static data surrounding last year’s US midterm elections and displays actual (raw) queries. More to follow …

Some telling examples are:

• obama: queries for accomplishments are more left-wing and queries including rumors and obamacare are more right-wing
• tea party racist signs: very left
• best tea party signs: very right

To find out more about have a look at the about page.

Inspired by Wilbert Baan’s Interactive Story Telling Experiment and a spare hour to code, I made another system using Flickr to generate image to a story. This time the system scrapes headlines from Google News, gets significant terms from Yahoo, and then queries those as tags in Flickr. This way Flickr provides random, though clarifying, pictures to the headlines – the photo editorial is generative but often illuminating (for example, getting this picture to the Rick Renzi story). I’ve made the page scroll down automatically and reload when all headlines have been flickrified so I can have my spare screen act as an always up-to-date, but augmented, rss-reader / issue-ticker. You can try it yourself at flickrNews US or flickrNews NL or flickrNews FR. The US version works best as the Yahoo Term Extraction Service is optimalized for English.