Real Estate Relativity

eMarketer reports that a recent study on traditional media’s use of blogs shows that 57.7% of respondents–US journalists –use blogs to measure sentiment.

Identifying Expressions of Emotion in Text (core study found here, registration required) is an intriguing “blog sentiment” study that identified targeted, emotion-laden words–”seed words”–and retrieved 173 blog posts from the Web that contained such. What the researchers found was that you can algorithmically determine the “emotive pulse” of a blog, or individual blog entries.

Once a product is developed around this method, one practical application of this is that you could quickly cull blog posts that target a certain emotion pertaining to a brand so as to determine positive/neutral/negative sentiment relative to that brand. This is particularly useful for brands concerned about maintaining a “real time” knowledge base as to their status in the blogosphere; thus, enabling brand managers to anticipate/preempt potential public relations crises.

eMarketer issued a report that blogs are big business (or have the potential to be). According to the article, advertising opportunities abound for traditional advertisers in the blogosphere as the number of blogs grow and readership increases.

And this research paper from MicroSoft adCenterLabs discusses intriguing concepts in tracking blog information flows with an eye towards charging an appropriate fee for a PPC advertisement placed on a blog.