After last Wednesday’s unveiling of the new Apple iPad, there were certainly a lot of opinions flying around on the Internet.
What surprised me, however, after running a sampling of relevant URLs with Spark, was the amount of anticipation and buildup for the product.
Using our proprietary influence algorithm (which takes inbound links, domain influence, persistence, and search source abundance into consideration), the number-one most influential URL is a category in the Business Insider for “Apple Tablet.”
Look at the screenshot from our 3D visualization and you’ll see the URL right in the center of everything and the other URLs that link to it in the surrounding area.
From there, you can also see the other URLs with inbound links and how that influence spread throughout the Web.
Internet chatter about the iPad began long before last week.
After weeding out spam and non-relevant posts, the average sentiment line graph to the right compares the positive and negative sentiment about Apple’s impending new product during the month of January.
Much of the talk surrounding the iPad concerned what it would be named when Apple finally introduced it. (The word “iPad” was only 11.4% more prevalent than the word “tablet” throughout all the URLs.)
As you can see, positive and negative sentiment was generally even with small amounts of flip-flopping up until the announcement on Jan. 27.
As the total amount of Internet posts fluctuates after the announcement, the positive sentiment continues to outweighs the negative by anywhere from 23% to 46%.
Our automated sentiment extractor finds examples of the most overt sentiment in all relevant posts. Of the 2,500 sentiment extracts up to Jan.31, Spark found that over 45% were negative and over 54% were positive (see screenshot to the left).
When you change that date filter to reflect Jan. 27 to Jan. 31, positive sentiment increases just over 4% and negative sentiment decreases by just over 4% as well (see screenshot to the right).
