Friday, September 7, 2007

wonkosphere.com Wonkosphere: natural-language processing meets the 2008 presidential race.

Need a reading on the 2008 presidential election but feeling a bit inundated with torrent of information flowing from the blogosphere? No wonder. Technorati reports that there are currently 39,557 posts about the 2008 presidential election. That search didn't include posts about individual candidates, such as the 226,000 about Senator Hillary Clinton or Fred Thompson's 8,000. Not to mention that slogging through a mess of blog posts about politics can bring you from the sublime to slime in no time.

There are signs that help is on the way -- such as from BlognetNews, a weblog aggregator organized by geographic regions and by topics. BlognetNews editor Dave Mastio sees this as a way to connect local publications with the pulse of the local blogosphere, as well as a way to make connections with bloggers as contributors.

BlognetNews collects blog aggregators, not simply individual bloggers, and posts content from feeds on its sites with continuous updates. The latest addition to BlognetNews network is blognetwork.knoxnews.com, featuring feeds from the lively blogging community around Knoxville, Tenn.

BlognetNews offers blogroll-style headlines from recent posts on its initial pages. When you click on any particular blog, you see a list of all of its recent posts -- but you are still on the BlognetNews site. This is convenient if you don't want to jump in and out of the aggregator site while browsing around. Less clicking and window opening saves some time.

This style of aggregation relies on human intelligence to add new blogs. The main criteria for getting on the top of their list is timeliness. Egalitarian as this is, professors Steve Corman and Kevin Dooley of Arizona State University and Crawdad Technologies have created a patented text-analysis technology that crawls thousands of blog posts and uses natural-language processing techniques to convert large amounts of text into networks. The program then uses the network to determine the relative importance of the words it collects and analyzes.

Their site, Wonkosphere, is free to use. Their reliance on an analytic program to measure how much buzz candidates are garnering also aims to get at the tone of the discussion at any point in time. Wonkoshpere's results are "computed without human intervention using natural-language processing algorithms" -- and thus are not subject to biases that might creep into human-powered blog aggregators.

So unless you relish the thought of working through 30,000 posts yourself, you can try either or both of these approaches to taming the wild political blogosphere circa 2008.

Which tools do you use to filter the political blogosphere? Share your favorites with us.

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