I’m sitting in my bed and breakfast in Torquay and catching up with the roar of the world just before I enjoy my last day here – and figured I’d do an analysis of the sentiment around the iPad – since it’s being so “hyped” by tech blogs.

Honestly, I don’t know if I’d want one or not yet – though I probably will end up getting one (even though I probably don’t need it).

While I’d like to go in great depth on this subject of the sentiment around iPad – I’ll probably do a spot check and just state my first impressions – since I want to enjoy what’s left of my English Vacation and afterglow of Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp that happened on Wednesday in London.

Also, I focused on Blogs for this quick analysis though there is a ton of twitter content to analyze – again, can’t do everything in one post – but I’d be happy to talk about doing a deeper analysis.

TechCrunch has a good post and how the sentiment (opinion) on the iPad is evenly split so far (last 3 days) and figured I’d look at it with Sysomos Map.

Look at the volume of mentions over the last 3 days alone on the iPad! Funny, but most of the buzz is coming from California – and that is somewhat telling me that the iPad hasn’t yet really caught on everywhere else.

But only about 1/3 of the mentions are positive – so if we just look at those people – then the negative – who are they and why do they feel the way they do about the iPad. Here’s a few snippets about what they are saying in “Key Conversations”.

First, the 34% positive – they’re almost all in California – hmm, I wonder where in California they are? Mostly in LA and San Francisco – I could analyze much deeper but after all, I am still on vacation.  Too bad I don’t have an iPad here to play with.

What about the people who hate the iPad?  Who are they and where are they?  What are their demographics and can they be converted to feel another way?

First, those who feel negatively towards the iPad are saying stuff like it’s overhyped.

Plus – while the “negatives” are in California mostly too – they are also almost as strongly in Washington State – home of Microsoft.

At any rate, most of the sentiment in both cases, is at the edge of the country – not so much in the midwest, etc.

While the samples are small, from what I’m seeing, there are more females that don’t quite get the iPad than males.

I guess if I wanted to go commercial with this analysis I’d ask why woman are not as enthusiastic about the iPad then men.

Plus, we know the limitations of sentiment analysis that I outlined at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp this week in London

How to Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service -Marshall Sponder – Webmetricsguru_dot_com_3!31!2010_V2

But I feel there is much more to say about the iPad via Twitter and other aspects of Social Media than what I have touched on here.  For example, here’s a bunch of positive and negative tweets that have high authority (as Sysomos defines it) below:

Enough work for today – I’m going to now go and enjoy my last day in Torquay – I’m all Stonehenge -d out and as I get ready to head back to the States on Monday evening, readying for a very busy couple of weeks ahead, I’ll be thinking fondly of my time here.