Chris Wilson | August 27

US News - The idea of reading a thousand political blogs every day might seem like Geneva-worthy torture, but it's hard to deny that there's some sort of useful information coming out of the blogosphere. Now the good news: you needn't actually read the blogs to find out what it is.

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Wonkosphere.com, which formally launched this week, aggregates posts from about 1,000 political blogs of all types and stripes, whether run by a newspaper or magazine or someone in his parents' basement, and extracts trends and patterns. Every four hours, the site updates the information with which presidential candidates have the most buzz among bloggers, as well as how mean or nice that buzz is. Blogs are split into conservative, liberal, or independent, and they don't include those from official candidate sites.

In this way, the site's designers, two Arizona State University professors who run a company called Crawdad Technologies, say they hope to capture the collective conscience of the blogosphere at any given time, while also collecting a lot of data that they can eventually sell to analysts down the road. In the meantime, the site is a way to save readers a lot of time by identifying the hottest links of the day.

Wonkosphere.com uses patented software to "read" every new post from the directory of blogs and analyze them using a sophisticated linguistic technique known as "centering theory," which identifies the most important words in a text. By contrast, most media organizations doing text analysis merely identify the most common thematic words in a speech or text. Centering theory is a more sophisticated way of doing this, says cofounder Kevin Dooley, a professor at the ASU business school. This theory, he says, produces a "network representation of the text," in which the important words span the boundaries between others.

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One Step Ahead
Ten blogs whose posts on August 26 best represented the collective buzz on August 27 (ranked).

1. SWJ Blog
2. NewsBusters
3. The Democrats Blog
4. The Thunder Run
5. Think Progress
6. CNN Political Ticker
7. The Agonist
8. The Strata-Sphere
9. Mydd
10. Open Left

source:Wonkosphere