Using Twitter as a Collective Mood Ring - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Twitter has been described many ways. At its best, it has been called a revolutionary political tool and a low-cost marketing machine. At its worst, it has been dubbed a waste of time.Technorati Tags: Twitter, hedonimeter
Now, two researchers are calling it a hedonimeter, a device that measures happiness.
Peter Sheridan Dodds and Christopher M. Danforth, a pair of statisticians from the University of Vermont, are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through the popular microblogging platform at any given moment to read public opinion and sentiment in real time.
The goal is to establish an index, akin to the Dow Jones industrial average, that can “give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time,” Mr. Dodds said.
“The goal is to take the public’s pulse on certain topics,” Mr. Dodds said.
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