This could be big: Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market Six Days In Advance
Researchers at Indiana University have crunched sentiment analysis data based on Twitter conversations and spotted a correlation between the general mood and movements in the Dow Jones Index.
As one of the commenters points out, if they were confident about this wouldn't they have left academia, gone into the markets and kept quiet about their findings?
The paper itself is not for the faint-hearted but introduced me to the notion of the 'self-organising fuzzy neural network'. I'm still fuzzy myself about whether Twitter is such a network but next time someone is rude about tweeting I'm considering saying 'are you comfortable dismissing the value of 'self-organising neural networks' and seeing what the response is.
