Text Trent Analysis

I’ve heard a few talks about the research in this article about analyzing text collections (such as e-mail!) for “word bursts” to organize texts or identify trends over time, and I think it’s really cool. The article even includes a speculation about applicability to weblogs for tracking social trends (and notes that Google already does something like this, though no mention of Daypop which is sort of the same though just using URL’s), but integrating this into an e-mail organizational tool intrigues me the most (which is described in a little more detail over at Scientific American).