January 2008

Following Monday’s State of the Union Address, both Time Magazine and Slate posted an analysis of its content on their site.  Time bunted; Slate swung for the fences.

Time’s visualization went with a view which scaled the size of the words in proportion to their frequency.  Think tag cloud.  The basic visualization technique was posted under the heading “State of the Union by the Numbers”.  Yawn.

With a simple explanation of how the technique works, a teenager could whip this out with a steno pad and a pencil.  The hardest part would be making it through the whole speech.  Reporting.  Not analysis.

Slate Magazine took a very different approach.  And they knew their results were in a different neighborhood than what Time and others were up to.  Slate’s work-up relied on the slick natural-language processing algorithms baked into Crawdad Technologies’ software.  A bit different than a simple counting exercise.  An excerpt from the Slate article (A Computer Reads the State of the Union):

By natural-language-processing standards, simply counting the frequency of words is unthinkably primitive. As computers get better at understanding the structure of sentences—think about that corrugated green line under a sentence in Microsoft Word reminding you to avoid the passive voice—they can do a much more thorough job reading political speeches and offering their insights.

Needless to say, Slate’s experiment is just a bit more interesting.  Looking at not only last night’s State of the Union, but all of Bush’s Presidential addresses, the software identified “four distinct voices” during his time in the White House:

1. “Domestic Bush” – 2001
2. “Security Bush” – 2002, 2003
3. “Visionary Bush” – 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
4. “Legacy Bush” – 2008

The table below provides further insight.

For another example of their technology in action, visit the Wonkosphere, currently tracking buzz online surrounding the 2008 Presidential race.  Learn more about Crawdad Technologies and their software at their web site, crawdadtech.com.

What does this have to do with online marketing?  Good natural-language processing technology is a Swiss Army knife for measuring buzz—and its tone—online.  Before stumbling across Crawdad I had planned to post about a few companies I’ve been interested in whose offerings cater to online marketers.  As with Crawdad’s Wonkosphere, these solutions focus on monitoring social media outlets.  A few of those companies: Nielsen (BuzzMetrics), Radian6 and Relevant Noise.

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