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Wonkosphere Measures Political Buzz

Wonkosphere Measures Political Buzz

A new site has been developed that can measure the amount of market-share and even the quality of buzz candidates in the upcoming 2008 presidential election are receiving.

The gloriously-named Wonkosphere was developed by Steven Corman, a professor and Arizona State University and co-founder of Crawdad Technologies. It searches the Web for postings about a candidate and also measures whether the buzz is largely positive or negative. It updates every four hours.

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“The influence of political blogging will be profound in this presidential election, and no candidate can afford to ignore it,” Corman said in a prepared statement.“Wonkosphere.com taps into that powerful nexus of political buzz and makes sense of it. It is a real-time scorecard for which candidate is winning the battle of the blogs.”   Thesite uses Centering Resonance Analysis, a network text analysis technology developed at Arizona State University, applying natural language processing algorithms. The text is converted and thenexamined to determine the relevant importance of all of the words.  

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