Friday, April 21, 2006

MoodViews: Tools for Blog Mood Analysis

Filed under: Net News

The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research is reporting on efforts, by Dutch investigator Maarten de Rijke and his colleagues Gilad Mishne and Krisztian Balog, to develop a method that can analyse changes in mood patterns on the internet.

Each day the programs pick up about 150,000 blog messages.

The clearly measurable responses to worldwide events suggest that these instruments pick up the global mood. And not only those of bloggers. De Rijke has already been approached by journalists, marketing specialists, psychologists and bankers. The Moodteam has something interesting to offer to all of these groups.

At present MoodViews has three components. Moodgrapher monitors the global mood of bloggers. These data are converted into overview graphs. Moodteller uses language technology to predict the mood on the Web. The latest component, Moodsignals, records unusual peaks in mood levels. After this it uses search engine technology to find an explanation for these mood swings.

Various other components of MoodViews are still under development. For example, Moodspotter will be launched this summer. This instrument will be able to search the moods associated with certain persons, locations or products.

We're already looking forward to website statistic pages that will tell us the nature of the collective subconsciousness of our readership.

The project page...

The press release...

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