Santa Clara based OpinMind has a neat service that polls the blogophere for its opinion on the topic of your choice. OpinMind claims to index 1.7 million blogs today. Type in a search engine-like query (or click on popular searches like “beer“) and see a result categorized into “positive” and “negative” for your query. OpinMind tries to determine whether a blog is positive or negative on the item you’ve entered based on surrounding context. And you can do a faceoff by typing two queries with a “vs.” between them. Try Google vs. Yahoo (Google nudges out Yahoo with a 73% v. 55% approval rating – I wonder if that will change much over time) . Or Democrats vs. Republicans (Democrats win with a 42% approval rating v. 27% for Republicans). Statistically relevant? Not even close. Fun? Totally. As OpinMind starts tracking more blogs over a longer time, I’d love to be able to track how opinions on a given topic evolve. And while it may be difficult to build a business around OpinMind (Matt Marshall says “Opinmind not ready for prime time“), I like tools that do interesting things with edge-based content. Maybe OpinMind, like Memeorandum, will get people thinking about new ways to do interesting things with blog and other edge content. And I do think really superb business models are there waiting, for the right idea. OpinMind was created by James Kim and Hongcheng (Charles) Mi. The OpinMind blog is here. → Read More