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Microsoft Research just announced the release of a new experimental search engine interface with a focus on personalization and social networking. U Rank allows you to reorder your searches, add notes, create lists of results, and share your personalized search results with your friends. The search results look like they are drawn directly from from Microsoft Live Search. Microsoft has created a short screencast that demonstrates U Rank's functionality in detail.

Are you addicted to the news lately? Here in the U.S., it's election season which means that easy access to live news coverage is a must-have these days. There was a time when you could only get the news via TV, radio, or paper, but now the web offers a number of different ways to watch the news. Whether it's your favorite news web site, up-to-the-minute blog coverage, streaming video, citizen journalism, or even desktop apps like Livestation, there are a million ways to feed your news addiction when you go online. Today, you can add one more app to your news-gathering arsenal: an Adobe AIR app delivering 12 live streams from FOX News.

Until now, Microsoft had used WindowsLive.com as the main hub for getting information about its Live branded services like Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, SkyDrive, and Photo Gallery. Today, Microsoft has re-launched the site as a community site, where users can exchange information and ideas about how to best use these tools. As Marty Collins, the Windows Live senior marketing manager explained to us in an interview last week, the idea behind this redesign is to better explain to users how they can use these services together, as well as fostering an active user community.

The online video streaming company Stickam.com today introduced a beta version of a paid service, PayPerLive, which will allow users to charge for access to their live streams. Basically, Stickam's new service allows anybody to set up a pay-per-view service, while Stickam handles the business back-end. With this new service, Stickam is specifically targeting consultants, bands, teachers, and fundraisers. As for costs, Stickam will implement a tiered revenue-sharing program, starting with Stickam getting at 25 percent cut of the profits.

The LiveSide blog today took a look at all the different bits of Microsoft's Live.com search universe and found that while the new look may live up to the stated design principle of "Simple and powerful. Human. Fast." it doesn't provide a common, unified experience. LiveSide found four different search boxes, two different Live.com "orb" logos (in four different sizes), and six different header backgrounds. While the slight differences in design may not be a very substantial issue, it is indicative of the confusion Microsoft has created around their Live brand.

Online and mobile video publishing service Kyte.TV, a darling of the European venture scene, has added still more funding to its substantial war chest and is taking a radically different approach to content.

The high hopes vendors like Kyte have had for User Generated video are crashing on the rocks of underwhelming consumer response and the market is shifting to a more traditional commercial media model. Will consumers come around in the future? Kyte says yes, I'm not so sure.

I just participated in a launch test for desktop video conferencing service Oovoo and if you're looking to have a private video session with up to six people then it's worth checking out. Mac and Windows users can have a high resolution session with IM, file transfer and video recording (Windows) augmenting the call.

The clunky launch of Yahoo! Live last week has a lot of people talking about live video online. There's a long list of services that you can use to do web based public broadcast of live video, but those services aren't what you'd use for small group, private sessions. Forrester explained the landscape well in a report last year, "Legacy videoconference systems of all types have failed to live up to their promise because of technical complexity and user interface issues." The tech problems are being solved and a free, cross platform solution with recording is great - but interface issues remain.