Blogging as a medium for communication, sharing, and
collaboration on the Web is growing in popularity. With the introduction of Web
2.0 applications, web users no longer just play the role of information
consumers, but also participate in information production. The Blogosphere, home
of all blogs, is a stage where virtual communities with similar interests can
form. These forces can affect the external world in areas such as viral
marketing, sales forecasting, political campaigns and even counter-terrorism
efforts. Recent numbers indicate that the size of the Blogosphere grows by about
100% every six months, and with such an enormous amount of information out
there, it is difficult to identify the influential blog posts and bloggers. In
order to effectively use this wealth of available information, it is essential
to be able to distinguish the active blogger from the influential one.
Researchers at Arizona State University have designed a Java
based application called BlogTrackers that tracks and analyzes the blogosphere
in order to help social scientists to better understand socio-behavioral
patterns such as understanding reactions to social events and grasping the
impact of the Blogosphere in the political arena. Blog posts can be collected
over various time windows from numerous social media sites. Additionally, blogs
can be analyzed for traffic patterns and tag clouds, which give a visualization
of frequently mentioned words. Furthermore, bloggers can be classified by their
frequency of posting as well as their influence based on a choice set of
metadata provided by the blog. Also, alerts and watch-lists can be personalized
so that users are notified when select words are mentioned.
Potential Applications
- Analysis of Blogosphere or other social media sites
- Blogger Analysis
- Real world event detection
- Keyword Tracking and User Notification
- Blog Search and Data Storage
- Blogger Analysis
Benefits and Advantages
- Crawls and performs analysis of blog data
- New crawlers can be integrated for new data sources
- Flexibility to choose data source to analyze at startup
- Personalized alerts and watch-lists to keep track of
keywords
- Identifies and analyzes influential bloggers
- Distinguishes between active and influential
bloggers