Meme tracking liberal vs. conservative: BLEWS from Microsoft Research

Blogger Matthew Hurst mentions that one of the projects he's working on at Microsoft was featured at their internal TechFest. (By coincidence: one year after Hurst joined the company.) From the project site:

BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps.

The basic process:

We consume the blog feed from that platform and first identify political (liberal/independent/conservative) blog posts. From those posts, we extract links to news articles and the text in the posts that surround the news links. We apply a classifier to that text, determining the emotional charge. The data is then imported into our database, and the news articles are crawled.

At TechCrunch, Michael Arrington mentions another company that measures emotion, though not for politics:

[This] somewhat reminds me of ScoutLabs, a startup we wrote about last December. Scout Labs helps brand marketers track commentary on their brands, and tries to decipher emotion towards that brand as well.

TechCrunch commenter "km4" notes that it's not a new field:

Microsoft is calling this hard bit “detecting emotional charge.

Everyone else calls it sentiment analysis.

Microsoft…. what an innovator !

(Google shows 78,300 results for the phrase.)

An aside: blogger Greg Linden joined Microsoft Live Labs back in January.