Can Blogs Predict Movie Buzz? Oscar Winners?

How good are bloggers at predicting movie success? Does blog discussion serve as a leading indicator or reflective mirror to box-office success? BlogPulse piggybacks on yesterday's announcement of Oscar nominations (today's No. 2 most-cited link) for the 78th annual Academy Awards program to examine the issue of blog buzz and flick successes or failures.

First, a research paper titled "Predicting Movies Sales from Blogger Sentiment," coauthored by Intelliseek's own Natalie Glance (a senior researcher and key member of the BlogPulse Team) and Gilad Mishne of the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam, has been accepted for presentation at a symposium titled "Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs" March 27-29 at Stanford University.

Their conclusion? References to movies in blog posts correlate with their financial success (before and after release), and factoring in sentiment measurements works better (especially in pre-release phases) than raw counts when making correlations. Genre and time of year also factor into a flick's success.

So what's this year's Oscar buzz?
Over the next few days, BlogPulse will begin tracking ongoing blog buzz about this year's nominees. Today: the actors and actresses nominated for this year's awards. First....the guys nominated for Best Actor, wherein Heath Ledger of "Brokeback Mountain" and Philip Seymour Hoffman of "Capote" seem to heading the pack:

And the women nominated for Best Actress, where Reese Witherspoon of "Walk the Line" seems to have an edge going into the event.




Tomorrow, a look at the films nominated for best picture.