Nick Bilton shares the latest research on trending ‘moods’ at The New York Times:
By gauging the mood of messages on Twitter, a group of researchers from the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Sciences, along with researchers from Harvard Medical School, set out to determine how happy or sad Americans are at different times of the day and week.
The full research project is called “Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day Inferred From Twitter.” It involved analyzing more than 300 million messages that were sent through Twitter’s service between September 2006 and August 2009… READ IT
Check this out: If you are interested in seeing how the most popular tweets about a subject are effecting the “national mood”, take a look at http://labs.windward.net/
It provides avisual graph of the tweet trends against a word or phrase.