Sounds like a combination of Google's Zeitgeist and LiveJournal's MemeTracker. In other words, nothing that new.
It's also the basis for Computational Lexicography. Doing analysis on large corpora. One of the interests people have in this field is introduction of new words in society. The field used to use corpora such as the British National Corpus, but since the explosion of the Web, sites such as Google can far exceed that size. Weblogs are simply a good example of a more natural form of language. The interesting thing would be not so much to find new trends through words... but if we can truly solve the whole natural language parsing problem and use such information to extract higher-level knowledge
I would ask of people to check with grassroots startups before posting things on very influential entities like slashdot. RJ was recently bombarded with a huge amount of new users due to the publicity of Audioscrobbler from other blogs and news sites.
His hosting service had shut down audioscrobbler.com because of the sudden surge of bandwidth usage. He then relocated the server to his own webspace, but with a slashdot hit, I don't see how it's going to survive. He's looking for cheap webspace for PHP/MySQL.
If you can get to it, Here [www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~rwj100/] is the news posting about it. Here is the same posting but google-cached.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a combination of Google's Zeitgeist and LiveJournal's MemeTracker. In other words, nothing that new.
It's also the basis for Computational Lexicography. Doing analysis on large corpora. One of the interests people have in this field is introduction of new words in society. The field used to use corpora such as the British National Corpus, but since the explosion of the Web, sites such as Google can far exceed that size. Weblogs are simply a good example of a more natural form of language. The interesting thing would be not so much to find new trends through words... but if we can truly solve the whole natural language parsing problem and use such information to extract higher-level knowledge
I would ask of people to check with grassroots startups before posting things on very influential entities like slashdot. RJ was recently bombarded with a huge amount of new users due to the publicity of Audioscrobbler from other blogs and news sites. His hosting service had shut down audioscrobbler.com because of the sudden surge of bandwidth usage. He then relocated the server to his own webspace, but with a slashdot hit, I don't see how it's going to survive. He's looking for cheap webspace for PHP/MySQL. If you can get to it, Here [www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~rwj100/] is the news posting about it. Here is the same posting but google-cached.