Wonkosphere in the Blagoblag

I happened on a political tracking website today that rocks. Wonkosphere scans the political blagoblag for buzz about presidential candidates. Blogs are classified as conservative (if they support a conservative candidate), liberal (if they support a liberal) or independent (if they don’t indicate support of anyone and choose to be considered as such). Scanning these blogs, they keep track of the buzz in the blogosphere that each candidate is generating. Each candidate’s page shows a graph of the amount of buzz amongst conservative and liberal blogs they are generating as well as the tone on those blogs. The tone is gauged by the language used on the blogs and it would seem that the average tone is slightly in the positive range (or else Wonkosphere needs to tweak its tone algorithm). This is some seriously cool analysis all done automatically. I wonder how well this will correlate with actual elections.

Sadly, Dennis Kucinich isn’t generating a whole lot of buzz at the moment. I submitted this blog to them and we’ll see if they accept me. I’m not exactly a political blog, but I don’t shy away from voicing my opinion here and there. Dennis appears to be largely ignored by liberals but is attracting some conservative attention. The negative levels in conservative blogs for him is definitely much higher than is typical, which means he’s doing something right.