ReadWriteWeb

Online content is published so fast and furious these days that no one can read it all. Ears are burning at corporate brands, too, because much of that Web content is talking about them. What are people saying? One part of answering that question is to ask how people seem to be feeling about the things they are talking about. Scalable, automated, accurate, sophisticated sentiment analysis is a much sought-after technology that almost no one has really nailed yet.

Jennifer Zeszut was the founder and CEO of Scout Labs, a social media monitoring service acquired by social CRM company Lithium in 2010. ScoutLabs does sentiment analysis, among other things, and Zeszut spoke at the O'Reilly Strata Summit on Big Data this week about the things her company has done that she believes point toward the future of this red hot tech trend.

Ten years ago the ClueTrain manifesto said that "markets are conversations" but today a more pertinent statement could be that conversations are becoming markets - or that there's a market for monitoring conversations. A whole class of technologies are emerging to help companies keep track of the conversations exploding online.

The web moves fast enough that we may as well start looking at what comes next. Easy to use and affordable tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs that track blog and twitter mentions are a given - but what kinds of crazy innovations can we hope for in the future?