
Analysing the web: Blog mining - davidw
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15660874
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elblanco
I've done a little work on Blog mining for a large conglomerate. One thing
that blog posts have in spades is a remarkably high affect compared to news
reporting. This enables high quality sentiment scoring to be useful.

In one case we found an increase in reporting on a certain topic in the
blogosphere coincided with a vast increase in negative sentiment about that
subject. Basically the more people were talking about that subject, the more
they hated it.

Then suddenly a drop-off of activity and the sentiment abruptly changed to
positive.

Turns out there was a flood of discussion about some upcoming legislation on
the topic and the feeling was generally that it was a stupid law that would
cost millions of dollars and not benefit anyone.

The law failed and discussion was quickly replaced with people back promoting
the failed idea...hence the slowdown in activity and the newly positive
sentiment.

We used a similar technique on a large number of topic areas an fairly
comprehensively mined consumer thinking for a fairly major branding campaign.

The morale is that the corporate world _is_ listening to what the bloggers
say, just in aggregate and not in too much detail.

