  Large scale surveys of public mood are costly and often impractical to
perform. However, the web is awash with material indicative of public mood such
as blogs, emails, and web queries. Inexpensive content analysis on such
extensive corpora can be used to assess public mood fluctuations. The work
presented here is concerned with the analysis of the public mood towards the
future. Using an extension of the Profile of Mood States questionnaire, we have
extracted mood indicators from 10,741 emails submitted in 2006 to futureme.org,
a web service that allows its users to send themselves emails to be delivered
at a later date. Our results indicate long-term optimism toward the future, but
medium-term apprehension and confusion.
