Convergence of Influential Bloggers for Topic Discovery in the Blogosphere

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatically detect "hot" or important topics of discussion in the blogosphere. The proposed approach is based on analyzing the activity of influential bloggers to determine specific points in time when there is a convergence amongst the influential bloggers in terms of their topic of discussion. The tool BlogTrackers, is used to identify influential bloggers and the Normalized Google Distance is used to define the similarity amongst the topics of discussion of influential bloggers. The key advantage of the proposed approach is its ability to automatically detect events which are important in the blogger community.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SBP
• Authors: Shamanth Kumar, Reza Zafarani, Mohammad Ali Abbasi, Geoffrey Barbier, Huan Liu
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Discussion, Influential Bloggers, Normalized Google Distance, SBP 2010