Emotion detector: What blogs tell us about mood

In the Journal of Happiness Studies: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Subjective Wellbeing (yes, for real, here) a paper by two University of Vermont statisticians claims that the nation's mood can be determined, in part, by the tone of it's blog postings.

Here's a chart from the paper (available here) showing an increasingly happy nation over the last four years (hearts are Valentine's Day and green trees are Christmas):

Of note is the overall upward trend (didn't political acrimony seem high back in 06?), the periodic declines in July/August (summer doldrums/stock angst anyone?), and the incredible sadness apparently felt among the blogogentsia over Michael Jackson's passing.

You can validate the statistical and research methods and conclusions for yourself (here). Essentially, they boil down to an automated index of blogs using a standard list of rank ordered words shown to convey particular emotions. Then, a magic algorithm is applied that enables age and geographic filters, among other things, to be applied to results and, voila`, the Emotion of The Crowds.

So What?

In some regards, the idea of a collective happiness index is similar to what pollsters have been attempting for decades...except that the sample size in the blog survey is much larger and is near realtime (it's automated afterall). It's also less representative of the diversity of the population.

And as fascinating as the idea of a global barometer of happiness might be, the idea highlights the challenge inherent in defining something as uniquely personal as happiness for such a large group. The paper's authors certainly concede that opportunities for improving the approach exist. They even go so far as to suggest that the approach could be more useful as a means of evaluating 'social contagion' and 'predictive theories' of social interaction...which sounds a bit like what stock markets seem to have become.

For marketers, however, it is a useful reminder that high-level trends can be valuable in scenario planning, ideation and in direction setting. It's also useful in reminding us that what may appear to be true and meaningful at the level of the group can break down completely when applied to the individual...that's as true of messaging, positioning, and creative as it is of our own happiness.

For those of you made happy as RUSH completists, here's the Emotion Detector demo tape:

Pulp fiction?

Previously, I've posted on various dismal assessments of the newspaper business (here and here for example). Of the many options that didn't involve variations on the status quo, one idea was to enlist citizen reports (i.e., bloggers) to make newspapers the ultimate local news source...able to be printed on demand.

Here comes an entrepreneurial precursor to making it happen: The Printed Blog.

The Chicago-based company will take the usual news gathering and distribution model and ignore it. Here's a few key features:

• Anyone can submit content.
• A physical paper will be printed twice daily and distributed at high traffic areas around the city.
• Editors will select articles around an issue theme, but the article copyright is retained by the author.
• Local versions could enable as many as 100 different papers being printed on any given day.

More on the many basics here.

So What?

Traditional news outlets have made half-hearted attempts to include video, blog postings and even Twitter-scratch in their news reports, oftentimes as a side show. But a couple of things stand out in The Printed Blog model that might be taken more seriously by Big News:

1. The model of journalists (in this case, interchangeable with the term 'bloggers') as owners of their work is something the traditional papers have been slow to make eye contact with. Except for celebrity opinionaters like Thomas Friedman or old-school investigators-turned-book authors like Bob Woodward, most electron-stained wretches get a by-line and a paycheck--but not the copyright--to their words.

2. Readers will select the blogs/bloggers they want more of. In this meritocratic approach to selecting who gets to be a reporter, one sees a different type of accountability being applied to local news reporting. Some may pine for the mythical days of the fourth estate as a place beyond the subjective demands of the marketplace or, worse, populist vagaries. But that bridge has already been crossed thousands of times. The Printed Blog acknowledges and embraces reality.

Like anything in the hype machine, the proof of concept will be told in the execution. But if the cause of any decline can be traced to a failure of imagination, The Printed Blog may at least provide a bit of inspiration for mapping a future that includes newspapers.

Required Pulp Fiction headline reference link: