The document discusses research issues, tools, and applications related to analyzing the blogosphere. It covers topics like modeling the blogosphere as a social network, community detection, influence analysis, and spam detection. Various techniques are described like content analysis, link analysis, and centrality measures. Popular datasets and tools for simulating social networks are also mentioned. Evaluation of different approaches is challenging due to the lack of ground truths in the blogosphere domain.

1. Blogosphere: Research Issues, Tools, and Applications Nitin Agarwal and Huan Liu Sunil Bandla INF384H – Fall 2011

5. Source: The New York Times “ The site, chock full of advertising, is a moneymaking machine – so much so that Ms. Armstrong and her husband have both quit their regular jobs.“ The reason? The advertisers are eager to influence her 850,000 readers. Arnold Kim, founder and senior editor of MacRumors.com. “ The site places MacRumors No. 2 on a list of the ‘25 most valuable blogs,’ …” What is the potential value? “Two of the other tech-oriented blogs on its list, …, were sold earlier this year, reportedly for sums in excess of $25 million.” Slide Credit: Liu & Nitin

24. Data Collection

34. Blogosphere and Social Networks Blogosphere Social Networks Influential nodes have “been influencing” Influential nodes “could influence” To share ideas or opinions To stay in touch or make friends Reputation is based on previous responses Reputation is based on the number of connections Person-to-group interaction Person-to-person interaction Community experience Friendship experience Loosely defined graph Strictly defined graph Nodes could be bloggers, blog posts, blog sites Nodes are members Implicit links Predefined links Directed graph Undirected graph