Quick Yoshikoder/General Inquirer update

In August, I described how I was constructing a modified General Inquirer negative dictionary to use with Yoshikoder, in order to perform a computer content analysis of press coverage of Second Life. I actually published the results on one of my other blogs, I, Lamont:

So, what does the data mean? The BW articles that were published in the latter part of 2006 generally had a lower percentage of negative terms than those published in the first four months of 2007. This agrees with the anecdotal observations by myself and a few other sources that BW hyped Second Life in late 2006.

However, the negative rates from the early part of 2006 were surprisingly high. In May 2006, the rate approached 5%, and that was the same month BusinessWeek made the famous pronouncement that "Virtual worlds abound in useful business applications." The analysis suggests that there was actually a stronger negative thread running through the BW coverage during this time, although that apparently dropped away during the summer, when the negative rate dipped to about 2.5% in August.

There are more data points, an Excel chart, and some notes about why I think the quality of the Yoshikoder-derived data quality is suspect over on my other blog.