Amazing visualisation – twittermood

It’s just a shame it only covers the States for now. TwitterMood is a project that visually displays the mood swings of the US by analysing millions of Twitter messages.

Created by the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in the US, the project works by looking at the ‘affective norms for English words’ (ANEW), a collection of 1034 words with some kind of emotional meaning.

The result has been turned into a (Google) map of the US with mood circles over population clusters.

Imagine the potential for policy makers or marketers…more to the point I guess this is the exactly sort of thing the Twitter founders had in mind in their leaked plans to become the ‘pulse of the planet.’

Pictured – I took a screen grab of Alaska and I see that Anchorage is pretty miserable. But Wasilla isn’t – isn’t that the place where Sarah Palin is from?

Via Data Mining