Forget Focus groups, here comes Umbria's Blog spy

Adgrunts, quick - start up a bunch of fake blogs talking favourably about your clients and their fantastic ads... Because Umbria Communications of Boulder has a web crawler that monitors hundreds of thousands blogs, turning the language in them into data more reliable than focus groups gab.

"We can parse the speech in these blogs, break it down by nouns verbs, adjectives and phrases to derive meaning and understanding about the speech and the speaker," David Howlett, Umbria's product management vice president, told United press International. "We use machine-learning algorithms to show who the speaker is and their characteristics."

Umbrias blog-spy has already revealed a few interesting things about "generation Y", one that the females talk more about beer than males do, with Guinness the most mentioned brand. God bless Guinness, it's good for you!

"What we've found interesting in tracking the blogosphere," Howlett said, "is that in Gen Y, the females were really the instigators in the use of Web logs. A little over a year ago, the majority of bloggers were women."

Starbucks is the most mentioned non-alcoholic drink in the Gen Y blogosphere, way ahead of Pepsi and Coke. McDonald's is the fast-food brand mentioned most often, though not always as favorably as Wendy's and Taco Bell - Blame "I'm lovin' it". Read more at Science Daily.