Twitter and Facebook may have gotten an early lead on mining social data for political sentiment, but Microsoft Corporate Vice President and former Clinton strategist Mark Penn hopes to make Bing the site of record for next week’s State of the Union Address. Launched in conjunction with Fox News, Bing Pulse is a sort of ultra-focused poll that lets viewers vote every five seconds in reaction to President Obama’s speech as it’s streamed on Bing.com/Politics; results will show up both there and on Fox News. Bing Beat, another new tool, will display more traditional “sentiment tracking” pulled from Twitter.
Bing and Fox News launching State of the Union site with continuous five-second polling
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
Pulse and Beat are similar to CNN’s Facebook-based Election Insights tool, and it fits with Penn’s previous experience as a pollster — with the exception that unlike an election, people’s voices don’t really have an immediate impact on the State of the Union Address. The Fox News partnership also seems to invite a somewhat obvious political skew, though Penn has included promotional videos from both Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a staunch Republican. The revamped Bing Politics site will go live at 3pm EST on February 9th, so we’ll presumably see then both who’s frequenting it and how the five-second voting system will work.
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