Nintendo will take legal action if the Web site operators don't cooperate, she added. First, the company's Web crawler looks for information that meets customer-defined criteria. Then a team of e-commerce analysts studies the automated reports and recommends a plan of action. But such services can be used for much more than just defending against defamation and piracy. In other words, they begin to use Internet surveillance for benchmarking and competitive intelligence, such as finding out when a competitor adds a new feature, like online customer chat, to its Web site.
Positive messages show up as a green bar, and negative ones as a red bar.
But NetCurrents may not stop there. Theoretically, the technology could be used to gauge customer reaction to a new product or voter reaction to a presidential debate. He's now testing the technology on Internet discussions about TV programs, in which fans of particular shows chat about the pros and cons of plot lines, actors and even clothing. We could deliver a report the following morning, in time to alter scripts or kill off a character that nobody likes. Pages will open in a new browser window External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.