We have twice blogged — here and here — about Moodgrapher, a mood-tracking site built by Gilad Mishne at the University of Amsterdam. It tracks the blog entries of Live Journal users and aggregates their mood indicators to see how a given event (a terrorist act, a natural disaster, an election) influences societal mood. Levitt proposed that corporations might employ a similar feedback device so that CEO’s could know what their employees are thinking.
Now Mishne has written us to say that yes, that’s a great idea, “but it requires employees to continuously report on their moods — and this is unlikely to happen, even if the reports are anonymized.” But Mishne already has a solution — “a new technology,” as he writes, “enables predicting the mood levels just by examining the text being written at a given time … This enables application of your suggestion without explicit reporting from the employees, e.g. by computational scanning of emails (of course, there are privacy issues here, but that’s a different discussion).”
This reminds me of a story, several months back, about how some companies try to gauge customer sentiment by measuring how hard a customer mashes the buttons on his phone while making his way through the company’s automated menus. Here is a demo of Mishne’s latest work, and here is his academic paper on the subject.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Mark Graham Brown has many good ideas on tracking employee satisfaction: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1563273063/qid=1127268458/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-5201894-0101715?v=glance&s=books
What I’m thinking is — proof reading isn’t your strong suit. But your knew that already, right?
wow, that’s rude.
The worst part of being an atheist is that there’s no one to talk to while you’re getting a blowjob.
Gaudere’s Law continues to astound. Is your claim, Robin, that your thoughts are proof that reading isn’t their strong suit? Or do you just have a penchant for breaking compound words apart, willy nilly?
I would think that running a regular poll on the company-intranet would be a much more direct way of gauging employee-sentiment than trying to extrapolate moods from some text they typed at some point…
Take a look at blogshares. I am surprised this sort of stuff exist.
There should be a mood indicator, or a frustration indicator, for people who do not have Live Journal accounts who want to leave comments on Live Journals. Blogger almost made that mistake. Well – they did for a little while, but they opened up to ‘other’ and ‘Anonymous.’