IBM Announces "Blog-Spotting" Software

notesdude writes to tell us InternetNews is reporting that IBM has announced new "Blog-Spotting" software that will allow the monitoring of blogs, wikis, news feeds, consumer review sites, newsgroups, and other community-generated content. From the article: "People can share and spread opinions faster than ever before and that's accelerated the impact of public opinion on businesses"

Comments

Better use for the technology?

[DogDude]

I'd like to see their "blog spotting software" used in conjuction with search engines so that I can NOT find blogs. They could either work with the big search guys, or incorporate it into a dekstop search client. Either way, I know that there'd be a ton of people such as myself who would use it to avoid the glut of crappy fake-journalist blogs.

This will help defeat opression

[cryfreedomlove]

This will help disseminators of dissent to stay once step ahead of oppressive censors in countries like Iran and China. Those guys are playing whack-a-mole and this product will just make the moles move faster.

Re:How is this new?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Thank you.
It's another step towards the semantic web.

Sturgeon's Law repealed!

[fuzzy12345]

Am I the only one left lamenting the general loss of quality in the new media?

It seems to me that a blog is (usually) a page put up by someone who thinks his ideas are so important that we'll overlook the fact that he can't spel or grammer.

Recently, I was treated to the idea that Wikipedia (the canonical source of non-canonical information on the Internet) is going to be dead-treed and sent to Africa. On the 'net, its lack of authority is considered acceptable because its defenders say nobody should rely on it exclusively. What happens in the bush? If we were shipping substandard pharmaceuticals to Africa there'd be moral outrage, but substandard info is apparently OK.

Slashdot? Not news for nerds anymore. Witness the posting counts: They're highest on the non-nerdy posts (which just keep coming). Why do I need ID from every angle on /. when it's on the front page of CNN? But put up an article on routers and DNS, and it's 80 mostly uninformed posts.

Sturgeon's Law needs to be revised: Now 98% of everything is crap. IBM seems to be building a crapfilter and connecting its users to the wrong output.

Re:This is new?

[shawb]

The significant added value is in summarizing the results, breaking responses down to positive and negative is something that I doubt any of the sites you mentioned do. It also analyzes trends in discussion, so you can then figure out what is creating buzz and what is a flop.

Now, this DOES assume that a comuter can analyze written language and pull actual meaning from it. Sarcasm is probably sure to throw a monkey wrench into the whole works, though. Hell, sarcasm is often lost on human readers; I don't give computers a chance on this point for a long time.