4. A system for scoring micro-blogging messages, comprising a general purpose computer configured to include: a. a term table in a relational database, the term table including a set of terms of interest; b. an extractor, configured to receive micro-blogging messages via an application programming interface of at least one micro-blogging source, 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 message table in the database, the extracted raw data including at least a posting account, a posting time, and message contents; c. an evaluator, configured to access the stored raw data in the message table, to parse the stored raw data into tokenized data, to store the tokenized data in a digest table, to detect terms of interest mentioned in the tokenized data, to analyze the raw data for indications of relevance, and to tag indicative micro-blogging messages in a digest score table; d. a domain specific sentiment dictionary; and e. a calculator, configured to access the domain specific sentiment dictionary and to access the stored digest score table, 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 store the scores in a hit table, to bucket the scores based on time-stamps of received microblogging messages and weight scores based on how recent the micro-blogging messages are, and to calculate a vector of sentiment metrics for an 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 a vector table; wherein at least one of the sentiment metrics comprises a normalized representation of a sentiment time series score.
5. The system of claim 4 , wherein the bucketing corresponds to predetermined intervals of time.