(Vienna, 4 November 2008). The latest analyses of the US Election 2008 Web Monitor shed light on fundamental differences in the online media coverage about the Democratic and Republican candidates. In the home stretch of the campaign, Barack Obama manages to defend his lead by capturing 42% of media attention (John McCain: 35%).

Tuesday, September 23, 2008
The US Election 2008 Web Monitor has been awarded the First Prize in the category 'Online Communities, Web 2.0 and Social Networks' of the Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-Business. After tracking candidate performance during the primaries and continuously refining the analyses, the development team took this opportunity to re-launch the Web site at www.ecoresearch.net/election2008. The project now focuses on the presidential candidates and their running mates, supplements the analytical tools with semantic and geospatial interfaces, and includes two social media applications built upon the Facebook platform.

Sentiment Detection is one of the research fields of the RAVEN project. It is a sub area of text mining and attempts to automatically extract the mood or sentiment expressed by an author of a written text. Armed with such means, it is easy for potential users - private enterprises, for example - to track the sentiment of the online community towards their brands and, if necessary, to adapt their marketing strategies.