Wonkosphere Measures Political Buzz

A new Web service is launched to measure the buzz each presidential candidate is receiving.

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.

“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.