Pulse of political insight?

Facebook's new version of Lexicon sports features that let its user base play with aggregated data from.

Lexicon was introduced last April as a way for users to gauge the "buzzworthiness." Lexicon searches all Wall, group and event posts for relevant words or phrases, then produces charts of their popularity.

In a nod to privacy advocates, Lexicon does not incorporate terms from messages, one-on-one chat, searches, or other private data.

Additions to the new Lexicon:

• Dashboard reflects the total number of unique users that mention a topic, the percentage of the Facebook user base that mentioned it, and the total number of posts.
• Demographics follow trends over time between users of different ages, genders and countries.
• Maps display where people are talking about a topic within different countries. It is currently limited to the US, Great Britain, and Canada.
• Sentiment shows how much people like or dislike a given topic. It also compares topics based their emotional appeal.
• Associations lets users see words and phrases closely associated with a topic in different points in time.
• Pulse highlights keywords that frequently show up in the profiles (Interests, Music, etc.) of people discussing the topic.

The features are not yet available for individualized searches, but Facebook has a sample laid out with 17 terms, most of which are related to either sports or politics.

For an example of user "sentiment" toward Sarah Palin since her introduction as Republican Vice Presidential candidate on Aug. 29, see the Unofficial Facebook Blog.

Other political insights from the new Lexicon: A "relative comparison"  US map shows that while Facebook's core youth demographic tends to favor Obama, McCain garnered much more attention in the past week, observes VentureBeat.