Opinmind is an interesting site that attempts to track opinions expressed in blogs. Search for “vegetables” and you’ll find that bloggers like veggies by a margin of 2 to 1, according to the Opinmind “sentimeter”(tm).

How accurate is the sentimeter(tm)? I’ll report, you decide:

In the world of news and punditry, the sentimeter(tm) delivered the following positive ratings numbers: 67% to The Drudge Report, 61% to Fox News, 58% to the New York Times, 47% to MSNBC, 45% to CNN, 37% to Sean Hannity and 26% to Rush Limbaugh.

In the world of music, the sentimeter(tm) gave out the following positive ratings numbers: 92% to Frank Sinatra, 92% to Elvis Costello, 90% to Van Morrison, 86% to Eric Clapton, 86% to The Beatles, 85% to Billy Joel and 78% to Bruce Springsteen.

Not bad on the face of it. But what about these: Positive ratings of 78% to Yanni, 77% to Britney Spears and 47% to Ann Coulter.

This is telling, though: In the Coulter search results, blog posts like “we have to endure the words of a hatemonger like Ann Coulter” and “I don’t like Ann Coulter because she’s a deliberate bomb-thrower” were posts determined to be positive. If you’re her book publisher, I suppose they are.

Opinmind is a great idea (with a 100% positive sentimeter(tm) rating, by the way), but they have some work to do before it becomes a truly useful tool.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 11th, 2006 at 9:19 am and is filed under Internet Stuff.