Accelerate the detection of trends by using sentiment analysis within the blogosphere

Information about upcoming trends is considered to be a valuable source of knowledge for both, companies and individuals. A large number of market analysts working at monitoring a particular business field, with many employing manual methods to do so. Since the amount of available data on the internet is far too high for humans to monitor, which carries a major risk of substantial amount of information being missed, the necessity arose to detect emerging trends automatically. Weblogs are an important medium to publish information and discuss certain topics. The web platform BlogIntelligence analyzes and visualizes the content and interconnection of blogs in the blogosphere. One area of focus is the detection of trends over a period of time, which is especially helpful for product vendors. But even more interesting, views expressed in weblog posts influence the reader´s opinion. Integrating the strength and direction of expressed sentiments enhances the trend detection significantly. In this work, we introduce an approach to enrich the trend detection with sentiment analysis.