According to a press release by the web-based company, E.lifemonitor.com passionate
discussions among movie fans flood the Internet weeks prior to the Academy Awards.
Many short conversations take place on Twitter and may be an indication of an actor’s
or actress’s or movie's popularity. But can it predict the winner of an Academy Award?

E.Life, a social media monitoring and analysis vendor, uses its Tweetmeter software
to find out.  It started tracking tweets from 25 different American cities that
mention the nominees and displaying them on a U.S. map on the elifemaps.com website.
This allows the viewer to see the most talked about actors or actresses in San
Francisco or the hottest movie buzz in New York.

By looking at elifemaps.com some conclusions can already be drawn: Los Angeles and
New York alone correspond to 40% of the best movie nominees buzz, not a surprise
since most of the media industry is concentrated in the two cities. For the same
reason, buzz in LA and NY is assumed to be a stronger indicator for the winners
than say Miami or Detroit. The general assumption is that the buzz in these two
cities has a higher chance of indicating a movie's or star's influence. And as
we all know Oscars are all about influence.

If LA and NY buzz is a reliable indicator, according to elifemaps.com, so far
Inception will be the winner for best movie and Black Swan will take 2nd place.
It's interesting to note that in San Francisco The Social Network has the most
buzz. Are technogeeks to blame?

As for performances, a Brit would take home the golden statuette for best actor.
Colin Firth has 50% more tweets than James Franco, who comes in 2nd. The same
criteria hint that Natalie Portman will win for best actress. Things get
complicated for the best director category. In Los Angeles Darren Aronofsky from
Black Swan has the pole position, but in New York David Fincher from The Social
Network beats Mr. Aronofsky, so there are no predictions here yet.

You can check out www.elifemaps.com for real-time results every hour. The monitoring
uses E.Life Twitter monitoring software Tweetmeter. The software tracks and stores
all tweets that mention a specific term and processes them to create more than 20
different reports.