Twitter a decent stand-in for public opinion polls
The next time you’re low on cash and need to get a quick read on the public’s feeling on politics or current events, consider sampling Twitter. According to a new report out of Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department, sentiments expressed via the millions of daily tweets strongly correlate with well-established public opinion polls, such as the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) and Gallup polls. The data analysis methodology still needs some tweaking, but the researchers still believe that Twitter posts could act as a “cheap, rapid means of gauging public opinion.” Assistant professor Noah Smith and his team collected 1 billion Twitter messages posted in 2008 and 2009 and analyzed them for topic (politics versus economy) and sentiment (positive or negative)
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ArsTechnica
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