Software Tracks Blogosphere Mood Swings

holy_calamity writes "Dutch researchers have figured out a way to measure the mood swings of the blogosphere. It can pick up peaks of flirtiness from bloggers around Valentine's Day and drunkenness at weekends, the plan is to create a search engine that returns the prevailing mood in the blogosphere about a topic. Companies are already interested in using it to track consumer confidence. What's the mood of Slashdot on this one?"

Blogosphere Mood

[NitsujTPU]

My mood always turns sour when people refer to the "Blogosphere."

I'll take a few fewer buzzwords a day, and call my Dr. next week to see if the situation improves.

Re:Been there, done that.

[Umbral Blot]

Are you trying to be funny? Getting a small group of people who speak english to and are willing to put up with voting / verification is in no way a representitive sample. Now if you went into their blog and determined their mood from the text, that might be cool.

Re:Been there, done that.

[Nesetril]

Not to mention, TFA doesn't explain how this is accomplished from a technological point of view. Makes me suspect that all they are doing is just a frequency analysis painted with Kinkaid colors and various insane words from the "blogospheric" vocabulary.

Marketing Buzz Alert

[anomalous cohort]

The Blogosphere (a collective term encompassing all weblogs) isn't really addressable so how can it be measurable? It's not like there is a URL to "the blogosphere" and how would you know if you have successfully polled all blogs on the Internet? This appears to be a subtle commercial for LiveJournal.

And?

[Jayjay75]

What would this tell us, exactly? That people are more inclined to get drunk on weekends and are grouchier on Mondays than on other days? This is something we don't already know?

Slashdot mood?

[TechnoGuyRob]

There's almost 30 posts and only one of them has been modded up (once, to funny no less)? I think I can predict the mood of Slashdot about this:

Indifferent

Or as a LiveJournalist would say:

like i don care man

Re:Reservation...

[Gyga]

I hope whatever they use listens to robots.txt

Re:Website still up?

[TubeSteak]

AFAIK, they're looking at Live Journal tags [science.uva.nl] and then comparing it to their analysis of the posts' text. [science.uva.nl]

I'm not sure how innovative this is, without actually knowing how they guess at the mood. Maybe it's something as simple as training a Bayesian filter and then saying "gosh, look at how accurate the predictions are!" The application would be innovative, but not the method.

It would make for some great targeted advertising:
Feeling depressed: Shop online for clothes!
Feeling in love: Buy your sweet heart some flowers.
etc

Re:Tracking bad hair trends, too?

[Rachel Lucid]

I should have known Livejournal was the source of this. With people's entries naturally having a mood category, the analysis becomes next to trivial.

Here I was hoping for something clever, like word frequency or something.

Re:Blogosphere Mood

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

What is this "special relativity"? I hate buzzwords. Just call it the ether like everyone else. I mean they're close enough...and nobody's gonna need to use "special relativity" in calculations anyway, it's just hypothetical.

Re:Why is it a buzzword?

[walmartshopper67]

It's a buzzword when it is used by people to describe things that have nothing to do with it. Like when 40 year old rednecks talk about one of my sites saying it is a "blog", instead of what it is and always has been, a website. A word like "slashdotting" would be a slang or scene type word, when a word like "blog" gets repeated all day in the media, usually to describe things that used to be "websites".

Re:Been there, done that.

[bnf]

So if there is a corelation between mood and blog posts how about using this data set to "prime the pump" of a Bayesian filter which would analyse blog posts on other sites and determine how likely it is that the blog post is one of these moods.

Re:Been there, done that.

[gold23]

Don't be too hard on yourself. I got it. I think it was the "Bah" that really tipped your hand.