My creative friends over at Delib have launched a tool to track online conversation, and used it to give us insights into the buzz around Boris, Ken and others in London Mayoral election. You can read the analysis behind the diagram here – Boris is getting talked about a lot, but there’s general discontent among voters.

Brand Republic provides more background on the tool and its uses:

The technology behind the Opinion Tracker uses spider programs similar to the robots and crawlers used by popular search engines to scan the web for specific clusters of keywords on blogs and other areas where internet users interact.

The data collected by the spiders is aggregated, and then sampled and processed by a team of analysts at Delib, to provide end analysis and metrics.

The metrics collated by Opinion Tracker are organised into different categories, including “buzz”, the level of noise created by internet users; “mood”, where public sentiment lies; and “what’s hot”, a summary of the main topics inciting chat among internet users.

“Live conversations” provides examples of what users are saying online.

Chris Quigley, managing partner at Delib, said “With the increased usage of social media by the general public, its now possible to find out what people are saying and thinking without running a straight opinion poll or focus group.

“Using a service like Opinion Tracker can help organisations keep an eye on what’s being said about them across the social internet and the levels of buzz they’re generating.”

Other research firms provide online tracking, but I think we can rely on Delib to make it fun too. They specialise in online engagement and e-democracy, with a mix of serious forums and games, as you’ll see here. I thought of letting them know about this post, but I expect they pick it up anyway …