In short, Opinion Tracker monitors what people are thinking and saying around the internet. We (Delib) track conversations around the net (in forums, in blogs and in videos) and then analyse these to show what people are thinking and saying about specific issues - whether that's to do with an event like the Mayoral elections, an issue like Climate Change or a business's Corporate Reputation.
See it in action at http://www.opinion-tracker.com/.
We specifically track four things relating to online conversations:
Opinion Tracker works though a combination of technology and people power. Our technology allows us to spider the internet (across blogs, forums, social networks) and identify what people are saying about specific clusters of key words. Once this data is aggregated, our team of analysts then sample this data and process it to provide the end analysis and metrics.
We think there's a huge amount of public opinion out there that is going comparatively unheard. The internet is a big social space where people discuss all aspects of the world and their lives. In a context very different to the controlled environment of focus groups etc, it's possible to find out for real what people are thinking and talking about in their own environment e.g. in their blog, or in a forum. This means we can find out what 100's or 1000's of people are thinking, rather than 10 or so.
The main use of Opinion Tracker is for intelligence gathering purposes, for either yourself or your work. By knowing what people are saying and thinking around the net, you are better informed to make decisions, input into articles or develop policies.
N.B Opinion Tracker is not an open source product.