Mining the Sentimental Journey

John — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:07:26 +0000

Analytical Thinkers typically are searching for the truth and the truth often implies hard, cold facts. The NY Times article Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts might seem hypocritical but speaking from experience, “there’s gold in that ther’ text.” In the mid ’80s I managed a group of employee relations analysts that mined mountains of text in an attempt to quantify employee morale for a 10,000 person company. Out of this work came “ERATS” or the Employee Relations Attitude Tracking System. (We were really tracking morale but couldn’t come up with a good acronym with that pesky “M”. Sentiment analysis is exactly what we were trying to do but completely by hand.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

Two recently devoured books on my shelf explore the web-analytics from a few angles. If you haven’t already, check out:

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters

Click – What Millions are Doing Online

John — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:47:33 +0000

I’m a bit behind sharing my recent reading list so I’ll try to spend some time over the next few weeks providing some recommendations.

I “listened” to the audiobook of Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters on my iPod. This is one of those fasicinating books that makes one think, “How can I get a job like that?”

Bill Tancer mines the gold found in search-engine data. I imagine him sitting in front of a computer screen with a massive amount of data starting his day by saying, “OK. What can we learn today?” What he learns is fascinating. From prom dresses to porn to politics, he uses search data to understand and predict consumer behavior. No need to search for this book — just “Click” on the image and get a copy for yourself!

Thinking Analytically » Click

Mining the Sentimental Journey

Click – What Millions are Doing Online