Monitoring the evolution of interests in the blogosphere

— We describe blogTrust, an innovative modular and extensible prototype application for monitoring changes in the interests of blogosphere participants. We also propose a new approach for the analysis of weblog contents that is supported by blogTrust and can yield new insights on the analysis of the blogosphere by monitoring the convergence or dispersion of blogosphere interests. The proposed process classifies weblog posts in predefined categories, generates a feature vector for each weblog from the post classification results, clusters together blogs with similar topics/interests, and, via visualization techniques, enables the detection of interest convergence or divergence among bloggers over different time periods. BlogTrust uses established, robust data mining techniques to support every step of the process. The motivation for the work is a hypothesized strong connection between important (global or "local") events and the rapid reduction in the divergence of (global o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Iraklis Varlamis, Vasilis Vassalos, Antonis Palaios
• Keywords: Blogosphere, Database, ICDE 2008, Proposed Process, Weblog