I spent all day at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, mostly listening, could not post or tweet as internet was down most of the day and by the time internet connectivity became available I was too absorbed in the material to want to tweet about it, etc.

The introduction by Seth Grimes was fine but nothing much stands out in my memory – Seth introduced what Sentiment Analysis is and some of the common ways it’s used along with issues of accuracy.

The first panel replaced a keynote (according to Seth Grimes) and featured Bradley Honan (StrategyOne), Greg Radner (Thomson Reuters), Brad McCormick (Porter Novelli) and Karla Wachter (Waggener Edstrom) – turns out Karla Wachter is a fan of mine and a long time reader of webmetricsguru.com (I just registered TheWebMetricsGuru.com which also now works) – the panel was moderated by Suresh Vittal (Forrester Research).  My impression is the first panel examined what is of value to stakeholders and what is the best way to present the data in a compelling way that gets action and buyin.   Greg Radner said the most meaningful thing to his clients was stock prices.  All the speakers had good ideas.

After a short break 14 or 15 pitches of 5 minute duration each took place -I uploaded a few to YouTube so you can view them below.

One of the best sessions of the day was Claire Cardie (Cornell University) talking about what business innovators need to know about Sentiment Analysis.   I found there are many levels of sentiment analysis and I picked up a lot of vocabulary.

I’ll cover the afternoon sessions, including my own, in another post.  I’d gladly go on by I’m so exhausted from a long, long day, I feel I would not do the material justice tonight.

I’m at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium today, speaking after lunch, as well. Posting will be light but I will tweet as much of #SAS10 as I can (using Tweetie 2.0, Twitter’s official iPhone client, of course).

I was at an informal meetup last night for #SAS10 as well, plus two other parties, the last being an “Edge” gathering at the nightclub “Slate”, ow W.21st. The evening ended as a ping pong ball my friends and I were using to play ping pong with, bounced under Clay Shirkey’s feet – I knew it was time to call it an evening – and to dream sentiment for the morn.

Here’s the Agenda of The Sentiment Analysis Symposium at a Glance

April 13th, 2010

8:00am–9:00am
Registration & Coffee

9:00am–9:30am
Chair’s Welcome
Seth Grimes, Alta Plana

9:30am–10:30am
Visionaries Panel
Moderator: Suresh Vittal, Forrester Research
Bradley Honan, StrategyOne
Greg Radner, Thomson Reuters
Brad McCormick, Porter Novelli
Karla Wachter, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide

10:30am–11:05am
What Business Innovators Need to Know about Sentiment Analysis
Claire Cardie, Cornell University

11:05am–11:20am
Break

11:20am–12:50pm
Lightning Talks
Jeff Catlin, Lexalytics
Steve Alexander, Serendio
Ravi Condamoor, Serendio
Justin Langseth, Clarabridge, Inc.
Mattias Tyrberg, Saplo
Fiona McNeill, SAS Inc.
Seth Altman, Mark Logic Corporation
Ole-Christoffer Granmo, University of Agder; Integrasco
Alec Go, Stanford Univ., Twitter sentiment
Brooke Aker, Expert System
Sally Church, Icarus Consultants
Dave Naffis, Intridea, Inc.
Breck Baldwin, Alias-i
Ian Hersey, Attensity
Laurel Earhart, SentiMetrix
Daniel Mayer, TEMIS
Bernard Chung, SAP

12:50pm–1:50pm
Lunch & Affinity Tables

1:50pm–2:35pm
Selecting a Social Media Analysis Platform/Provider: A Conversation
Moderator: Suresh Vittal, Forrester Research
Nathan Gilliatt, Social Target
Marshall Sponder, webmetricsguru.com AND Porter Novelli

2:35pm–3:10pm
Pharma Sentiment Surprise! – Online Conversation Yields Unexpected Results
Stephanie Noble, Paden Noble Consulting

3:10pm–3:45pm
Financial Markets
Richard Brown, Machine Readable News, Thomson Reuters

3:45pm–4:00pm
Break

4:00pm–4:35pm
Voice of the Market
Tom Anderson, Anderson Analytics

4:35pm–5:10pm
Sentimental Market Segmentation
Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology

5:10pm–5:45pm
Sentiment, News, and the Polarity Problem
Leslie Barrett, LBTechconsulting

5:45pm–5:50pm
Conclusion
Seth Grimes, Alta Plana

5:50pm–7:15pm
Networking Reception

By the way, yesterday I also registered “TheWebMetricsGuru.com” domain for my self. After all … There are many ….

Try to summarize all the interesting stuff going on – lately been so busy “doing” and speaking, that I haven’t had the chance to keep my web journal up to date with what’s happening.  But first, just want to remind readers I’m speaking at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium next Tuesday here in NYC on Selecting a Social Media Analysis Platform/Provider: A Conversation.

When I was in London last week and speaking at Monitoring Bootcamp – Nathan Gilliatt took up the first two sessions with a comprehensive survey of what Social  Media tools provided, while I handled free tools and sentiment (my presentations are up as well as the ebook I provided, just look at my last post and you can get them all).   I suspect our “talk” about what these “sentiment tools” provide will be quite animated – I am expecting some questions from “left field” from Suresh Vittal of Forrester Research (who, I believe, authored last years Forrester Wave on Listening Systems).

Also, I’ve been invited to attend the Social Business Edge Conference on April 19th here in NYC – there are still tickets you can buy and it’s only 95.00 bucks – cheap, if you ask me.

Now that I’ve spoken on how to build Social Monitoring using free tools – I’ve been asked more about that and found SocialMention.com is a good service if you don’t have money (use it with Google Reader and Postrank) – I write about that in my ebook.   I also have been thinking about web alerts and enabling business to take advantage of what Web 2.0 (or Social Monitoring Web 3.0, whatever we want to call it) has to offer and am going to start consulting on that more directly – you’ll see some changes on my site shortly to reflect this more “strategic” shift – I see a lot of businesses that don’t know how to setup up or act on the information they get – and I can help get you started.  I haven’t changed anything else I’m doing – I’m just adding something new, or more directly.

Anyway, here’s a few interesting links that caught my eye lately:

Do you believe that Twitter: 60 Percent Of Registered Accounts Are From Outside The U.S? I do – but I think 75% of the accounts here and in the US are spam.  Meanwhile, Nathan Gillatt posts about most reputation measurement is actually measuring media coverage, not reputation – Nathan captured my interest in the beginning of the post (got lost figuring out where it goes, though) – still, it’s an interesting way of looking at reputation.

And Yahoo! is telling us How to Dominate Search Results through Social Media Sites which provoked an interesting commentary in the search world on how Yahoo! displays better results for Matt Cutts than Google does (where he works).  Oh well, can’t have everything, right?

But where Google has become the master of the Universe – it hasn’t always been a consistent master as shown in a post on The Problem Of Inconsistent SMB Contact Details – Part II in Search Engine Land.  But never mind , because Russian President Dimitry Medvedev just started tweeting (in Russian or English?).

And just yesterday the White House told Federal Agencies to  Beware Social Media Ratings and Polls while releasing new guidelines that opens up Social Media to the Federal Government a bit more.  Andy Beal sees problems in this and has an interesting point of view.   Lastly – Top Business Schools Pumping Out Social Media Savvy Graduates and to think that I spoke to two ladies from the London Business School just last week at #msmbc10.

I can go on like this and have a whole month to catch up with – but then, I have other things to do today – so maybe I’ll catch up on my web journal another day.