14 DAY TRIAL // Live Journal enables its users to attach a mood tag to their posts. This information about the mood of each blogger is public and has now been centralized by an interesting site called MoodViews. MoodViews analyzes the overall mood of the blogger community comprising around 2 million people worldwide and writing around 150.000 posts daily.
MoodViews has three features and more are in the pipeline. The first feature, Moodgrapher, simply displays how many people had a certain mood during a certain time period. The second feature, Moodteller, uses past data to predict the future evolution of moods. And the third feature, Moodsignals, compares the predicted data to the actual evolution of moods.
This third feature is the most interesting as it identifies unusual, unexpected, mood developments - it identifies the periods when there's a large discrepancy between the predicted mood and the actual mood. These are the periods when something unusual has happened. The site uses a text search tool to analyze the posts from that period and finds what words are occurring most often. These words might give a clue about the nature of the unusual event.
For example the site reacted within minutes to events such as the London bombing when the general mood suddenly changed to distress, sadness and anger. The site has also made some unexpected discoveries such as the fact that people were more excited about the release of the new Harry Potter book than about Christmas, as well confirming things like the fact that the level of drunkenness increases every weekend. Around New Year's Day 2006, the site has witnessed a broad spectrum of moods nostalgia, drunkenness, contemplation, and hopefulness.
Another feature of the site, Moodspotter, is to be launched this summer. This instrument will be able to search the moods associated with certain persons, locations or products. The MoodView site is part of a project called 'Computing with Meaning' developed by a team of scientists from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research under the coordination of Maarten de Rijke. Unsurprisingly, their project has already caught the attention of marketing specialists, psychologists and bankers.
