Another Buzz-Checking Application -- Blabble

This is the second buzz-checking application I've covered in a week or so. Is the next big blog problem going to be buzz spaham? Are we going to have people posting runaway praises of things in their 'blogs, or waxing sarcastic in order to fool a buzz 'bot? Are we going to have people creating sycophantic doorway pages complete with RSS feeds and then submitting them to every RSS crawler in the world? Are we? Well, until then there's Blabble, currently in beta at http://www.blabble.com . Blabble describes itself as a blog research and analysis tool.

The front page offers a list of sample research topics culled from over 4 million Weblog posts. From that we can determine that the Princess Diaries 2 was cute, cheesy, stunk, etc. Samples are divided into raw thoughts (which tend to repeat themselves), phrases (phrases with counts), time (volume of commentary over time) and tone (quality of feedback over time.)

You can also sign up for the free beta test. (Note to blabble, how about coming up with some different things besides movies for your samples? Like Coke C2 or whatever it's called, root beer, or iPods? Just askin'.) At the moment custom research is not available; instead Blabble has started their "Market Groups". The one displaying as I'm looking at it shows buzz (in the format described in the second paragraph) about retailers including Walmart, Sears, KMart, American Eagle, etc.

I must admit I was suspicious of Blabble being able to easily find buzz on Target, which is a common noun. But looking over the comments I see they've done a pretty good job -- there are a few references to target shooting but they appear to be in the minority. There was less success in the "Recently Described Purchases" area, which described such ethereal items as "that libby was", "woot lol then" and "yay but omg".

The site also has a mailing list for which you can sign up, and a developer blog (for a service called Blabble, this blog has really short entries.) The task of parsing and analyzing blog comments is pretty huge; I'm sure we're going to see a lot of changes and upgrades as they go through beta.

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