Taking the community's pulse: one blog at a time

ABSTRACT

The blogging phenomenon has caught the on-line world by surprise; the number of blogs doubles regularly and the number of daily blog entries seems to also continuously increase. Even more interestingly, blogs seem to compete with authoritative media outlets as a means for delivering news and opinions. The perceived power of blogs to inform and form, public opinion has given rise to several blog-mining services analyzing the blog entries to infer the reputation of their customers. In this paper, we discuss our work on visualizing and systematically analyzing several blogs in the same domain of interest (movies) in order to assess to what extent the buzz of blogs correlates with public opinion.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods
          Subjects: Semantic networks

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.2 Document Preparation
          Subjects: Markup languages; Hypertext/hypermedia; Format and notation

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.0 General

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
blog mining, topic maps, visualization