According to a Globe and Mail story, Buzz cuts through the on-line rumour mill, (Jerry Langton, August 4, 2005, Globetechnology Section) Accenture researchers have developed a technology called the Buzz Engine that tracks topics through lists and blogs. It looks like it does something like the culture tracker we developed, graphing the relative frequency of keywords – real-time text analysis.
Here is a quote from Gary Boone, PhD: Weblog:
At Accenture Technology Labs, we have developed the next generation of search engine. Itís a kind of summary engine that focuses on online buzz or discussion. Online Audience Analysis is a buzz engine that interactively shows how much buzz there is on a given topic. You can search for topics of interest and see how much public attention that topic receives. Is anyone talking about the new Xbox? Are more participants in technology discussion sites talking about iPods or about Creative Zen Micros? Online Audience Analysis can show you.
A quote from the Globe article:
Mr. Boone, who has a PhD in machine learning from the Georgia Institute of Technology, says the Buzz Engine is based on custom algorithms that summarize the topics present in an on-line discussion. The program runs on several powerful servers and executes about 25,000 queries each day, returning up to 8,000 stories that are relevant to the search. These are then filtered to arrive at about 3,000 unique, weighted stories each day. The results show how the stories about a company and its products are evolving over time in the media, on blogs and in chat rooms.
“Clicking on a spike usually brings up stories about recent product launches,” Mr. Boone says. “You can sense whether your new product has generated a high level of interest, what type of interest, and even head off product issues before they become massive business problems. . . . The value is in showing issues evolve that you might not know about, but need to know — perhaps centred on your products, operations or markets.”