2. The computer system of claim 1 , wherein the alert comprises an email message sent to the user.
1. A computer system for scoring micro-blogging messages, comprising: a. an extractor, configured to receive micro-blogging messages via an application programming interface of at least one micro-blogging source, to access a set of terms of interest, to detect received micro-blogging messages having least one of the terms of interest, to extract raw data from the micro-blogging messages, and to store the extracted raw data in a private database, the extracted raw data including at least a posting account, a posting time, and message contents; b. an evaluator, configured to access the stored raw data, to parse the stored raw data into tokenized data, to store the tokenized data in the private database, to detect terms of interest mentioned in the tokenized data to identify relevant micro-blogging messages, to tag in the private database micro-blogging messages that contain a term of interest as being relevant to that term of interest, and using a posting account of a micro-blogging message to tag the micro-blogging message as indicative; c. a calculator, configured to access a sentiment dictionary and to access the stored tokenized data of micro-blogging messages tagged as indicative, the calculator further configured to calculate a sentiment score based on sentiment values of words and phrases in the tokenized data for the micro-blogging messages that were tagged as indicative to improve the accuracy of calculated sentiment metrics and to reduce processing resources required, and to calculate a vector of sentiment metrics for a term of interest based on the sentiment scores associated with the term of interest and falling within a predetermined lookback period, the calculator further configured to store the vector of sentiment metrics in the private database; and d. a publisher, configured to allow users to set thresholds on at least one of the sentiment metrics for a term of interest and to send an alert to the user when the threshold is exceeded.