Yahoo's Toy for Political Nuts

Kevin Maney notes: About a year ago, Yahoo bought a company called BuzzTracker, which was started by an old friend of mine, Alan Warms. BuzzTracker searches through millions of blog postings to find most-blogged stories -- in other words, the topics that are getting the most buzz. It still operates as a stand-alone site.

But Alan just told me that Yahoo has integrated BuzzTracker into a Yahoo offering for the first time. It's part of something Yahoo is calling its General Election Political Dashboard. The centerpiece of the dashboard is an interactive electoral votes map, which lets you mess around with different scenarios to see what would happen if, say, Obama steals Virginia from McCain. This isn't exactly something I personally would do with my copious spare time, but I realize there are plenty of people who will get a charge out of it. The dashboard also feeds users top political stories -- and has a "most blogged about" button. That would be where BuzzTracker comes in.

I did learn from Yahoo's map that Oklahoma is right now the most rabidly Republican state in the nation, and that it's really hard to get your cursor to hover over Rhode Island.