The revolution in the internet has caused a huge increase in the number of Social Networking sites, blogs, forums and various other forms of online expressions of reviews on products, latest trends, question and answers, recommendations. All this data relates to the personal interests, opinions and feelings of the online community This has created a mammoth amount of data that can be used for understanding personal interests, likes and dislikes of people, moods, behavioral patterns, user satisfaction of a certain service or product, how certain events affect their activity, moods of people.

This data thus opens door for a new type of data mining- SENTIMENT ANALYSIS. This means mining the data available from various social online media like micro blogging sites as Twitter, blogs and forums,rss and atom feeds, sites like mashable, social networking sites as Facebook, MySpace can produce information that could be extremely useful in areas like targeted product marketing, finding how a new product is faring in the market, how certain actions by corporations may affect their popularity or cause rise or fall in their stock prices, what brands are become trendsetters, which  products from competitors are surviving the markets and ways to get an edge over them etc.

Many new companies have already taken a front foot in this lucrative field of data mining with a goal of developing applications and services, using which the company management can better understand what is influencing their customers, competitors and the state of the present market by monitoring and analyzing (mining) the enormous amount of information that originates from the growing number of information sources.

Scout labs ,a Sentiment Analysis company provides a powerful, web-based application that tracks social media and finds signals in the noise to help its clients create better products and stronger customer relationships to their numerous clients as HP, Deloitte, SonyBMG and others with product as Sentments,Trendspotter etc .

Jodango, as claimed “The world’s first Opinion Utility” provides its clients analytics through context matching, extracting patterns from the client and other sites using their “Article Focused Approach” that uses articles as a source of data.

Nielsen ,the giant providing TV rating also provides web metrics ,over took Buzz Metrics to provide sentiment analysis and has proved its worth between its competitors.

Techrigy, now acquired by Alterian provides sentiment analyses through their  proprietary technology SM2 focused on marketing professions and returns results charting the comparisons, demographics, geo-location, sentiment and drill-down reports.

Symosos provides two flagship products MAP (Media analytics Platform) and Heartbeat that provides real-time snapshots of online feed/content in a GUI model.

TNS Cymfony, uses its flagship product Maestro Platform that crawls the web for forms, blogs and categorizes, it and displays it in a user friendly graphic manner.

A list of various other companies providing Sentiment analysis is given below:

Lexanalytics provide their text analytics software Salience4 that provides sentiment analysis by methods of Entity Extraction, Entity Relationships, Document Summarization, and Sentiment or Tone extraction.

Biz360 has designed a proprietary technology, that provides  analysis using natural language processing (NLP) to aggregate to  analyze vast amounts of media and market information that provide with information useful to better understand the customers, reach out to them and succeed.

Evri,a  semantic search engine has released a new web API that they have claimed understand the way the web feels. Developers can use this API to develop tools are services focused on market study, sports and entertainment, brand management etc.

Various tools are available in order for the individual users to sentiment analyze.

Sites like Tweetfeel (searched tweets using a sentiment analyzer), Twitrrat (that’s provides a positive or negative feeling about any product or topics by mining tweets) , Twendz (it highlights conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in and it has the ability to dynamically alter as conversations keep changing by evaluating about 70 tweets at a time)

Backtype is a conversational search engine that crawls the web for data and index to serve in real time what people all around the world are speaking about a certain topic of interest.

Newsswift, a tool from The Financial Times, provides search results by matching relevant results, identifying relationships and deducing web sentiments (positive or negative).

StumbleUpon provides add-ons on various website to collect information that people feel is interesting and wish t o refer other to read. It users a “Recommendation Engine” that takes various user rating, calculates a rating and presents it.

Mashable, the blog that focuses on social media news and keeps reviewing new Web sites and services, posts latest buzz and  news on what is new on the web and seems to be popular among Bloggers ,Twitter and Facebook users.

Various other services, products and companies continue to rise in lure of providing insights in the social online life by mining their activities, opinion and thus developing a deeper understanding about the masses and potential customers and hence providing a better knowledge source to develop business .

So finally the entire world cares for your OPINIONS and FEELINGS, so you can feel proud to speak yourself to the world – and social network and enrich the online community. Feel all you want and the world hall know about it. Hope a SENTIMENT ANALYSIS on this article returns a POSITIVE result. Keep mining.

-Venkatesh, Student Intern.