Kurzweil posts about a system developed for “mining the blogosphere,” i.e. BlogSum, a sophisticated listening natural language processing system for evaluating and indexing blog content developed at Concordia University. “The system is capable of gauging things like consumer preferences and voter intentions by sorting through websites, examining real-life self-expression and conversation, and producing summaries that focus exclusively on the original question.” This is a technical concept that David DeMaris and I had discussed some years ago, thinking of potential activist/political applications. It’ll be interesting to see how this technology is deployed.
