I have been reading lately about credibility ratings for social media application - specifically, trying to define the value and rate their content.
Why so important?
Clearly, the voice of the Internet is being ‘bought’ by large media conglomerates and becoming more commercialized. The Internet is now used to promote products and services. What was news is now simply a public relations exercise.
The Social Media movement, including ‘purchased’ A-list bloggers and $ocial Network enthusiasts, are now being used to sell goods to unsuspecting users-slash-buyers so this article in the NY Times about sentiment analysis tools comes at an interesting time [thx to someone where i saw this ...].
In a genuine initiative, I have been evaluating online credibility in my role at the United Nations - trying to visualize and understand the +/- trends of the news for credibility and bias.
Online, perception is everything. If users know the sentiment trend of the online opinion and news, users can evaluate its credibility.
Throw this information on a Google API and you now have a ’sentiment map’. Put this on a time variable slider and you have a comparative ’sentiment-over-time’ visual. Map this against your Communications strategy and you now have some empirical understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
Interesting.
Perhaps the semantic web isn’t that far off.
