Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Blog is not a word.
This is old news. Just blogs? Bah! Color me unimpressed. I've already harnessed the power of the Internet to track the mood of the entire planet: http://www.howisyourday.com/
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
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.
Reservation...as with most topics that involve personal tracking, and large corporations having access to personal information (and yes, I consider my mood personal information when it's being used to a company's advantage).
From whiney to really pissed off?
The blogosphere is female? Oh wait, we're on our way to understanding it. Nevermind then.
+1 Smart ass
+1 Pro Linux
-1 Corporatism
-1 Proprietarism (is that a word? Happy 4:20..sorry)
And...of course
+1 CowboyNeal
Disregarding the above blabber, this software sounds so flippin' cool. I've always thought about the overall mood of people, and if there's relation between it and a certain period of time. Like a website that simply asks "Are you happy right now?" or "Are you sad right now?" Very useful information! *gazes up at sky*
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Companies might be better off using a magic 8 ball...
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
The software, called MoodViews, was created by Gilad Mishne and colleagues at Amsterdam University, The Netherlands. It tracks about 10 million blogs hosted by the US service LiveJournal.
...
Monday - Mood: Emo
Tuesday - Mood: Emo
Wednesday - Mood: Emo
userMood=random(3); switch(userMood) { case 1: user="Depressed"; break; case 2: user="Drunk"; break; case 3: user="Happy" break; } return 0; On another note, I thought most companies didn't like their users blogging.
Was a yellow-green now looks like its changing to a deep purple.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
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.
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?
Great. Humans already have trouble interpreting the tone of electronic messages. On top of that, let's have some algorithm tack on the subtle clues so necessary for proper interpretation of human communication. After all, computers have already shown a bang-up track record dealing with Human languages.
Cool project though. Hilarity will undoubtedly ensue.
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
They did this for Livejournal. It would always, without fail, return "tired".
[o]_O
d00d, it's only thursday. you should feel "flirty and lonely" today not drunk and merry. you GODDAMN OUTLIER, remove yourself from the blogosphere or you will spoil our sales pitch to Google.
Jesus said to his disciples: "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one" - Luke 22:36
damn, the parent just broke the mood analyzer thingie.
Jesus said to his disciples: "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one" - Luke 22:36
"Sardonic."
That green slime had it coming.
every time you want to say "blog", just go ahead and say it. but afterwards add: "crying out loud". like this: "blog crying out loud". you won't notice when you start saying "for crying out loud" instead.
Jesus said to his disciples: "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one" - Luke 22:36
The ability to automate the aggregation of all this information and display it is pretty cool, and the target for this data mining is the general population is pretty cool.
Of course things like trends will skew it so its not really what people are thinking, but rather what theier online personality wants other people to think they are thinking.... but still, very interesting!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
VTMarik is a sad panda. BOMB THE BLOGOSPHERE! /QC Rocks! //Fark sig out!
"Geeky"
There I go pissing karma away again....
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Just as useless, and as unprovable. Next, specialized computer technology to detect the color underwear most bloggers wear?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Amusing, but fairly pointless unless the thundering herd of sheeple that live their lives by what's hot/popular go for it - at which time it'll become profitable in a limited way for a limited number of people.
Otherwise? yawn
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
This can't be right.. the website is still up. Perhaps that is because no-one can find the link To the actual moodviews website.
I can't decide if I should feel guilty for posting this..
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
Niet nodig...
Laten we zeggen dat het ons geen reet kan schelen wat de bui van Blogosphere groupthink is...
Babelfish dat
Wow, sounds like you've got an appointment with the business end of a CNN camera crew, yourself.
Does this mean we all have to start tagging?
That's great...brilliant idea...[/sarcasm]
It sounds like they're doing interesting work, as long as nobody takes it too seriously or starts, like, trying to make money off of it (in which case you'll see some form of astroturfing zombie army emerge to tweak the bogosphere's Mood Indices.) What happens to LiveJournal moods in September, or graduation time, or Christmas break, or release-date-for-some-popular-game?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That's an amazing demonstration of how technology can reveal insightful and as yet unknown facts about humanity that we never would have been able to predict without this fantastic new tool.
I can't believe how cool.... oh wait... Doh!
Whats next? podcastosphere? TrendytechwordO'sphere?
I've found thier top-secret code:
Mood of LiveJournal: angsty
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
The article focuses on the moodview, which analyzes the tags that bloggers use. While this may lead to some interesting data manipulation procedures, I think that Mood Teller is more interesting, it actually scans the text, and makes a guess on the mood. Then it compares its guess to the actual data that was gathered using the blogger tags.
Seriously, why is it a buzzword? It describes a unique phenomenon. It's just a word. I could say that "slashdotting" is also a buzzword that a few select nerds on the Internet use to describe a phenomenon as well. Also, why is that a few slashbots have to hog karma by repeating the same tired arguments?
This is just another weapon for Bushitler's arsenal against civil liberties and free thought!
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
They could just implement a "Magic 8 Ball" complete with fancy random seed generator, add their own personal bias for the day, and no one would know any better! But, "really cool, dude."
I guess that puts me in the smart-ass category...
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
BuzzMetrics is already doing similar type of stuff. You can pay them to research your product or to keep tabs on it and some sort of search engine technology captures how much buzz the product is generating on the web as well as compiling reviews, blogs, posts, articles, etc., for review.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
For my next trick, I'll teach you how to keep strangers from seeing your bare genitalia.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
According to their page, under "Which moods are hot?" they list "high"
? high
http://ilps.science.uva.nl/MoodViews/Moodgrapher/
Notice the sudden spike in the "high" mood on 4/20? I thought that was interesting.
SecureThe.Net - Practical Resources for Securing Systems
Hope they don't run this algorithm on my corporate account. They will find out how drunk I am just to get through a day's work.
All these pop-AI things come down to one thing: keyword search counts. Create a bag of keywords, count the number of times they show up in some arbitrary (usually Web these days) search, and make an arbitrary determination of what each bag of keywords means. Then pass it off as some sort of special intelligent sensor or machine intelligence, add in some buzzword references to biological brain structures or psychological processes, and pretend you are some genius.
But guess what? It's just a set of arbitrary keyword search counts and essentially arbitrarily meaningless. In most cases, just the data sampling side of things is rife with egregious statistical errors. In this case, it's even worse because they are essentially taking a search-space soft pitch ("mood labels") and just aggregating the counts.
http://halfpasthuman.com/ has been doing similar for several years now with their "webbot" project. They use crawlers to check out what people are saying, the mood of the web, etc, and their own analysis software, then they have been doing geopolitical/economic and "other" (like upcoming maybe disasters, etc) predictions based on the results. They have been surprisingly..uhh..surprised. They have gotten better with each new crawl. It's a (reasonably priced) subscription service though to get the full reports.
note: link URL also leads to speed reading/comprehension software. Two different products here, I am referring to the top of the page, the ALTA reports from each new crawl.
I have no ties with them whatsoever, just it fits in the news category.
the other problem is a certain kind of person is a blogger and that's the kind of moods being read: someone who thinks the world cares about his/her emotional state, what he/she put up with from some store clerk, what ill-informed opinions he/she has farted out today with no relation to the known history of the planet, etc.
if businesses tune themselves to these kind of people, there's no hope for the rest of us.
Emoti-bombing. Just like GoogleBombing, but for emotions on LiveJournal!
AC's modded -6. I don't see you, I don't mod you, anything you say is lost. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
While individual applications can vary in how good they are, or are not, the general area of research is an interesting one. Yeah, OK we can spot Emo kids angsting on LJ, but couple Mood Teller with some context and you start building something like what Neal Stepheson describes in Interface.For example, what it the mood of people when they are thinking (writing) about Iran? How about Apple's Boot Camp software?
Of course there are a few non-trivial issues to solve like biase (people are more likely to blog about a topic when they feel strongly about it). But that's not likely to be much worse than telephone polls.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The answers to that just came in
"Original colour unidentifiable due to excessive staining."
Not everyone will use the same tag. Thus you get to come up with an (average) percentage of confidence. Then you can cross-correlate this against some words that occur in all the given samples, and have some sort of confidence metric about your measurement.
From here, you might be surprised at the different kinds of trends you might find. A spike in the number of people who happen to be excited about the latest fansub of Naruto, for instance. Hm, I bet that means that episode is good.
You might also be able to do longitudinal studies of the information, based on mood with respect to a specific event. Say, Katrina.
:(){
But not as much as the people who read them.
Oh wait, there's blogs outside LiveJournal/MySpace? Where people write about things other than themselves?
My mistake.
This is an extremely interesting story. I think they have some kind of dictionary setup that compares various words to a bunch of different moods, and then some calculation based on how many of each category of words shows up. So if there's a bunch of cuss words, for example, it'll figure people are pissed off.
If it is female you have exactly FA chance of ever understanding it...
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The next sentence is not true. The next sentence is not sarcasm. Software like this makes me happy since it is very useful.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Shoot all marketing arseholes. Is that opinionated enough for you?
So, this is what it does -- it counts a particular variety of tags on a particular blogging site and charts them. That makes this software so incisive ! Please move along....
Thats interesting.. it shows a spike for 'horny' followed a few hours later by a spike for 'depressed' which I presume means all those horny people didn't get laid again..
Now, I don't have MPD, but I do have very different blogs for very different occasions. And I guess I'm not the only one who tries to spin here. Corps use the tool of a blog by far more aggressively than me, and they create moods rather than displaying one.
So tracking those would not track the mood bloggers have, but the mood they'd like to create.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
what, like Moodgrapher? I don't understand what's so new?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
because someone just patented the Frowny - http://www.despair.com/demotivators/frownonthis.ht ml
Seriously, how long before someone patents your emotions. Brave New World had nothing on this!
please explain to me how ROI and TCO got into this list?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Blog \Blog\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Blogged} (bl[o^]gd); p. pr. &
n.
1) A foul, smelly obstruction of the sewer pipes connected to a residence. For example, "We'd better call a plumber, this blog is really bad".
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
I'm amazed at the amount of useless trivia I know.
Hooray for the internet!
I quit!
WEB 2.0, BLOG, PODCAST, BLABLA BLA LAND - The Return Of The Dot Com BOOM!!!!
./ is one of them.) .blog. in their link and set my adblock so I'll never see one again.
Who the fuck gives a shit a about blogs? (Don't give me the
For me blogs are just junk.
(Funny that you can't beat them without becoming one of them.)
I would like to force them to put
There's a little gadget that skims the XML version of livejournal and examines the standard moods from all public posts. (You can type whatever you want into the mood box, but it disregards these custom moods.)
Here it is, for which it's author will be eternally grateful for me posting, I'm sure.
Anyway, I realize that it's not the same thing, but in my small deluded brain, I can dream that something I knew about was the inspiration.
Hup Oranje!
Het dagschotel is kaasballetjes met konkommersoep. Een pintsje AUB. Deze autobus reidt naar buiten dienst. Welkom bij Blokken.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Moongrapher BTW is
What they are missing is a negative control. Sure I can easily see how Loved, Flirty or Lonely correlates with a Valentine day, but what about the control graphs that show "Agressiveness towards republicans" or "Cheesecake affection"?
PS. I am surprised by the modded up dismissals of the post by
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
the huge spike in "drunk" on 3/17. :-)
It's because of the blogosphere (as much as I hate that word). It's the fact that you can get an overview of the current thoughts and emotions of the entire human population (or at least a huge chunk of it, certainly well above the boundaries of "statistically significant").
and apparently the Internet is flucuating between horny and pretty creepy.
lol...
moodstats has been around for a few years. it's a really cool app put together by the fine folks at k10k.net
Personally, I don't have much confidence in consumer confidence reports as it is. If they want to use speculative results from blogs, they are going to probably make it worse. It's bad enough that they talk about consumer confidence on the news so much as it is.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
I wrote a web-based mood tracker that looks at particular strings entered into blog and discussion board posts related to whether President Bush should be impeached or otherwise removed from office.
Link to Bush-Be-Gone Index
No matter your politics, I think how the index moves up and down depending on particular events is somewhat fascinating.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Actually, the blogosphere is clearly defined:
"blogosphere" is the new buzz word that has replaced "information super highway." It's what idiots like to call a collection of "blogs," otherwise known as a tragedy.
Maddox
Defining Statistics and Social Research