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?"

Comments

Been there, done that.

[XorNand]

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/

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.

[JordanL]

FTA: On Valentine's Day, there is spike in the numbers of bloggers who use the labels "loved" or "flirty", but also an increase in the number who report feeling "lonely".

So let me get this straight... all this to discover that people either think about their relationships or lack or relationships on Valentines Day...

This is the ultimate geek software. "What is this strange thing... emotion... I'll build a software program to explain it to me."

Re:Been there, done that.

[daviddennis]

Actually, the article was pretty clear on how it worked, but I'll explain it a little better since I guess (from your post) it was confusing.

When you write a blog entry in LiveJournal, you're give an opportunity to select a "mood" from a dropdown list of moods. So you can say you're

happy
sad
loved
excited
lonely
(etc)

by just picking the appropriate word.

Now, as you know, emotional data taken from a dropdown list at the end of writing a blog post might not be worth taking all that seriously, but it's data, and you can try to analyze it.

Now, some people are laughing at this by saying that it should of course be obvious that people are likely to be feeling loved or lonely around Valentines' day. But actually this is an important observation, since it says that what people pick in the dropdown can be related to real events. Of course we know people are loved/lonely on Valentines' day; what we didn't know is if what they picked on the dropdown was meaningful. Now we know it is, and so (in theory) we can use this to predict events or people's behaviour based on what they say.

The Harry Potter example showed that this could in fact be done, and this means that further reasearch might be promising. For example, let's say there was a "suicidal" mood in the list. It would be interesting to track whether actual suciides were predictable or at least more likely after showing those moods, so that an early warning system for such behavior could be created.

On paper, it seems possible that lives could be saved that way, which makes this a non-trivial application indeed. To support my theory, note the previous news reports we've seen here that note that suicidal behavior was often predictable in hindsight from what people wrote on their Myspace profiles. If this could be determined from moods, which are trivial to check automatically, it might be a very interesting result indeed.

Hope that helped people's understanding.

D

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.

Can it detect the entire spectrum of moods?

[koweja]

From whiney to really pissed off?

Re:Can it detect the entire spectrum of moods?

[mctk]

The entire spectrum of moods is from whiney to really pissed off? You're married aren't ya?

::ducks

So...

[TechnoGuyRob]

The blogosphere is female? Oh wait, we're on our way to understanding it. Nevermind then.

Tracking bad hair trends, too?

[cno3]

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 ...

Mixed Signals

[_Sprocket_]

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.

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:BuuurrrPb

[Nesetril]

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.

Re:Reservation...

[shawb]

I understand your concerns, but information that you yourself put on a webpage should not be considered private. If you don't want personal information to get out, don't post it in a public forum. Besides, it doesn't sound like this particular piece of software is really collecting personal information; all it does is look for spikes in a particular mood tag, and then parses through the text in the publically readable text to find unusual words. If this helps companies figure out what products actually excite people, then they will come out with products that people actually like (if used properly.)

As a company (and especially as an investor) I would, however, take any information gathered through such a technique with a grain of salt or two. It seems that it would be close to trivial for a company game the system and set up enough accounts or bribe enough bloggers to tip the scales one way or the other, essentially creating inter-corporate astroturphing.

Website still up?

[Chris_Jefferson]

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..