Tracking bloggers’ moods, scientifically

What you write tells more about you than you might realize.

That’s the theory according to a group of Dutch researchers who have launched MoodViews, a scientific examination of blogs and bloggers.

Maarten de Rijke, Gilad Mishne, and Krisztian Balog are the leaders of the “Computing with Meaning” project, which follows the moods of 2 million bloggers from all round the world. The data come in the forms of words, millions of them, actually, nearly 150,000 blogs a day and are analyzed for signs of what the writers are feeling based on what they are writing about.

MoodViews has three parts: Moodgrapher, which crunches the numbers according to word algorithms and spits out overview graphs; Moodteller, which analyzes what is being blogged and reports on it; and Moodsignals, which flags unusual peaks in mood levels of those who blog.

The researchers say that they have fielded requests for the services from many aspects of societies, including financial experts, marketing officials, and (of course) psychologists. Now only if there was a version for TV News, maybe its not needed since that is always sad.