Microsoft researchers discuss Blews, which is a horrible title for a promising new tool that sorts blogosphere chatter according to the red/blue political shift, and also identifies the emotional intensity of the response.

Our current visualization shows the count of liberal inlinks to a news article as a blue “wing” on the left, and the number of conservative inlinks as a red “wing” on the right. The emotional charge of the discussion around the news link is shown as a “heat indicator” on the outside of the wings. Emotional charge ranges from a single orange square to four white-hot squares. Clicking on the wings produces a dropdown of the individual blog posts linking to the news article. In the dropdown, emotionally charged posts have a fuzzy border, while emotionally neutral posts have a solid border.