MoodViews Tracks Bloggers' Moods on LiveJournal

Posted on April 22, 2006

A service called MoodViews is tracking people's moods on LiveJournal.com. A New Scientist article says MoodViews tracks the mood label that is used on many LiveJournal posts -- about 150,000 of the 250,000 daily LiveJournal posts are tagged with a mood.

Moodviews reveals patterns that follow on weekly, monthly and even yearly cycles. For example, the label "drunk" becomes increasingly popular each weekend. The label "stressed" appears less during summer months and more towards the end of each year, perhaps because of end-of-year work deadlines or the stress of visiting in-laws.
On Valentine's Day, there is spike in the numbers of bloggers who use the labels "loved" or "flirty", but also an increase in the number who report feeling "lonely".
The latest addition to Moodviews, a program called Moodsignals, tries to explain match these blogospheric mood swings to current events. It identifies emotional peaks by comparing recent label usage with records of previous use. When it finds a spike, the program picks out less commonly used words from relevant blog posts in an effort to identify the cause of the emotional change.

Moodviews even has a prediction service called Moodteller that predicts where moods are headed. The moods do appear to track accurately with events and weekends. For example, the "drunk" label increases in popularity during weekends and "stressed" rises at the end of the year.

Moodviews reveals patterns that follow on weekly, monthly and even yearly cycles. For example, the label "drunk" becomes increasingly popular each weekend. The label "stressed" appears less during summer months and more towards the end of each year, perhaps because of end-of-year work deadlines or the stress of visiting in-laws.
On Valentine's Day, there is spike in the numbers of bloggers who use the labels "loved" or "flirty", but also an increase in the number who report feeling "lonely".

The services Moodgrapher also tracks the moods for global events like Hurricane Katrina and New Year's. LiveJournal bloggers can also slap a moodsticker on their blog.