This document discusses sentiment analysis and opinion mining of user generated content. It begins with an introduction to sentiment analysis and how it differs from traditional text mining by focusing on opinions rather than facts. It then discusses how user generated media on the web, such as reviews and forums, provide a huge volume of opinionated text. Examples are given of how sentiment analysis can identify opinions, targets, and opinion holders within text. Different approaches to sentiment analysis are outlined, including document-level and feature-based sentiment analysis and summarization. Challenges with sentiment analysis are also discussed, such as the difficulties of entity and feature extraction.