Software created in Amsterdam can track and detect the general mood of the LiveJournal corner of the blogosphere, by assessing the emoticons used by posters in their blog entries.
The MoodViews software, as discussed in New Scientist, can tell if the approximately 10 million blogs on LiveJournal are feeling happy or bored or silly.
“I noticed that blog posts on LiveJournal have mood labels attached,” co-creator Gilad Mishne of Amsterdam University said in New Scientist. “We started to collect this information and noticed trends in different moods over time.”
The project’s website described the tools they have made available, all with a focus on those mood labels:
MoodViews is a collection of tools for tracking the stream of mood-annotated text made available by LiveJournal. At present, MoodViews consists of three components, each offering a different view of global mood levels, the aggregate across all postings of the various moods:
• Moodgrapher tracks the global mood levels,
• Moodteller predicts them, and
• Moodsignals helps in understanding the underlying reasons for mood changes.
Research has found the existence of patterns that follow weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles. Some of that research may appear to be a case of the obvious to a jaded observer: “drunk” labels increase around the weekend, while “stressed” pops up a lot more around the end of year holidays.
And last July, the Moodsignals tool managed to associate “excitement and similar emotions” with the words “Harry”, “Potter”, “book”, and “shop”. “These terms were submitted to the news archive which showed the excitement was about the latest Harry Potter book,” Mishne said.
Well, tag me “astonished.”
Though MoodViews focuses on LiveJournal currently, with a continually updating list of hot and not-hot moods on the MoodViews homepage (“sleepy” at 6 am ET, again an incredible deduction), other industries have an interest in the technology.
The report cited an investment banker that wants to find an application that can track consumer confidence in different products. That type of research would be desired by just about any industry, especially since many either track mentions of a corporate name or brands through something as simple as Google Alerts or as complex as the deep online research tools provided by Factiva.
Right now, LiveJournal is cold, rushed, high, crazy, and working according to MoodViews. If the concept can be expanded beyond LiveJournal, a difficult proposition due to most blogs not being on that platform or having mood reporting, it would provide a quick snapshot of the overall online mood. Seeing that developed would leave me tagged “impressed.”
—
Add to document.write(“Del.icio.us”) | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | PreFound.com
Bookmark Murdok: 
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
