Internet Mood Swings

Did you wake up this morning, feelin' fine, until someone's blog lit a fire under you? If so, you're not alone, at least according to Dutch researchers Maarten de Rijke, Gilad Mishne, and Krisztian Balog (the "Moodteam"). They've written MoodViews, a program that maps and graphs significant changes in mood patterns on the Internet. All in all, MoodViews tracks the moods of 2 million LiveJournal bloggers from around the world, picking up about 150,000 blog messages daily of which about 80 percent have a mood attached to them.

MoodViews consists of three components: Moodgrapher tracks the global mood levels, Moodteller predicts them, and Moodsignalshelps in understanding the underlying reasons for mood changes.

Moodgrapher does not look at text, but instead focuses on the labels that many LiveJournal bloggers attach to their message. Moodteller uses a small set of words to estimate moods. Moodsignals identifies abnormalities, then finds all words associated with them.

Have a nice day!

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:24 AM  Permalink