I soldier on.
Favorite new word. ‘syntagma‘.
Designing a new nifty data structure to enable efficient & fast construction of optimal combined lexical and LALR syntax parse tables from a context free grammar. Fun thinking time ahead. I’m going to sit down with a large sheet of fine paper and a 2B pencil and a few glasses of wine and make a good session of it.
Who Blogs The Bloggers?
Blogs are almost what the world wide web was supposed to be as defined by Dr Bush’s good idea and TBL‘s good implementation. Now that we have a million screaming opinions – what we really need is a search engine that lets you gather a group of blogs together as a single dataset and then interrogate what they say as a trend.
eg.
“Do they believe in God?”
“How much do they know about the law?”
“Will they vote for me if I go to war against Iran?”
James McParlane's Blog 
Great idea, there’s already a very large market in the information retrieval industry for gathering and diseminating competitive intelligence. So you think the Blog should become the politicians finger on the electronic pulse ?
Simple questions can already be answered using Blog specific search egines like Feedster, but they are restricted by the normal semantic limitations. Questions like "Will they vote for me" are in the Turing test league i think. Im sure you could create some simple indicators for regonising opinion – i.e phrase analysis, look for negative and positive statements etc. But it probably wouldn’t be very accurate. Bayesian analysis is too fragile, but Latent Semantic Analysis might do the trick.
"Syntagma" is a nice word, i think i like "Morpheme" better though.
Yes. Blogs have a bit of everything. Opinion, feedback and the links between them a well structured and seem to indicate ‘I am interested in this too’ or ‘I agree with these people’ or ‘Here is someone I know’.
A company that could take a list of Blogs and combine them with a query and get a simple answer will be onto something big. Even if its just noticing a flurry of activity or on a given keyword or phrase.
And blogs are available in nice clean XML… what more could you want.. its a gift horse 🙂
Actually, theres already a lot you can gain by looking at the results produced by various Blog aggregators. I know a guy who is developing a tool which can highlight such factors.
In fact we were discussing this very same issue on Friday, he said that it was quite useful to watch the links/trackbacks from Blogs that you enjoy reading becuase whilst it does not provide a measure of opinion or topic, it does provide a point of reference and some guarantee that you might be interested in what’s being said.
I wonder if its safe to assume that negativity promotes more flurry than positivity ?
Take a look at del.icio.us, its an online topical link database. You can subscribe to other peoples interests.
This page belongs to the individual i mentioned above:
http://del.icio.us/ade