Interesting Startup: Scoutlabs
It goes without saying, if you care about your brand (product, website, blog, you name it) you better spend some serious time wading through what the users/consumers say about it. If your time is free you could track each source or you could spend a couple of bucks for someone to filter out the noise, aggregate it and present it in a more user-friendly manner (hey, graphs!).
Scoutlabs has been running as a closed beta for a select number of companies but had its public launch today. The main idea behind it is to find signals in the noise and help you keep track of all the relevant posts, comments, rants, replies, images, videos, tweets and what-not in real time to help you react to it in time (or at least automatically notify you whenever something significant happens).
By using natural language processing techniques it tries to detect the tone and sentiment of the content, would you find a false positive (it might fail at irony) you can just help it get smarter by guiding it it in the right direction by a simple click.
Anyhow, as mentioned earlier it’s not free – you’ll have to shell out $99 to $250/month for it. Would be interesting to see free alternatives to this though.