Blogs as a Means of Preservation Selection for the World Wide Web

Currently, there is not a strong system of selection in place when looking at preserving content on the Web. This study is an examination of the blogging community for the possibility of utilizing the decentralized and distributed nature of link selection that takes place within the community as a means of preservation selection. The purpose of this study is to compare the blog aggregators, Daypop, Blogdex, and BlogPulse, for their ability to collect content which is of archival quality. This study analyzes the content selected by these aggregators to determine if any content which is linked to most frequently for a given day is of archival quality. Archival quality is determined by comparing the content from the aggregator lists to criteria assembled for the study from a variety of archival policies and principles

Blogging: Rants, Raves, and Random Thoughts

Unless you have been asleep or just born in the past three years, you will have found many library articles touting the growth and value of the weblog.1 You may also have attended one of the many technology/library conferences, such as Computers in Libraries, and even an ACL Conference and gone to a presentation on blogs. You will have heard that you must blog, and in conjunction use RSS – whatever that is – if you wish to communicate more effectively with your patrons, your staff, or anyone else.2 Hopping on the blogging bandwagon can “save” your institution, make you a better librarian or teacher. As Irene McDermott notes, “Just as it has been imperative for everyone to have a Web page, now everyone with the slightest interest in being au courant must, absolutely must, have a blog.”3 This paper will examine the hype surrounding blogging, the hope or potential benefits of blogging for your institution, as well as the hysteria or negative aspects of blogging. This will be accompanied by comments about my personal experience over the past 4 years with The In Season Christian Librarian. Writing a formal article about blogging seems odd because the style of a blog is casual and conversational and often stream of consciousness. Marshall Brain (2004) says, “There is no particular order to [blogs]. For example, if I see a good link, I can throw it in my blog. The tools that most bloggers use make it incredibly easy to add entries to a blog any time they feel like it.”4 However, given the short time blogs have been around, several doctoral level theses on blogging have appeared in Dissertation Abstracts.5 This paper does not draw on dissertations but does make reference to several formal presentations at conferences in addition to national surveys and white papers. Even after 4 years, much remains unclear and undecided about blogging

Cascading Behavior in Large Blog Graphs

How do blogs cite and influence each other? How do such links evolve? Does the popularity of old blog posts drop exponentially with time? These are some of the questions that we address in this work. Our goal is to build a model that generates realistic cascades, so that it can help us with link prediction and outlier detection. Blogs (weblogs) have become an important medium of information because of their timely publication, ease of use, and wide availability. In fact, they often make headlines, by discussing and discovering evidence about political events and facts. Often blogs link to one another, creating a publicly available record of how information and influence spreads through an underlying social network. Aggregating links from several blog posts creates a directed graph which we analyze to discover the patterns of information propagation in blogspace, and thereby understand the underlying social network. Not only are blogs interesting on their own merit, but our analysis also sheds light on how rumors, viruses, and ideas propagate over social and computer networks. Here we report some surprising findings of the blog linking and information propagation structure, after we analyzed one of the largest available datasets, with 45,000 blogs and ~ 2.2 million blog-postings. Our analysis also sheds light on how rumors, viruses, and ideas propagate over social and computer networks. We also present a simple model that mimics the spread of information on the blogosphere, and produces information cascades very similar to those found in real life

Optimizing Sensing: From Water to the Web

Where should we place sensors to quickly detect contamination in drinking water distribution networks? Which blogs should we read to learn about the biggest stories on the Web? Such problems are typically NP-hard in theory and extremely challenging in practice. The authors present algorithms that exploit submodularity to efficiently find provably near-optimal solutions to large, complex real-world sensing problems

Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers

Presents findings from a survey that explores how a group of mostly youthful writers and creators are using the new medium of blogging to express their creativity by documenting and sharing their personal experiences

Blogs of their own: a story of two Malaysian Women Bloggers

Over the last few years, with the introduction of easy-to-use and integrated services such as Windows Live Spaces, blogging has moved into the mainstream in Malaysia, with women making up 64% of bloggers. Blogging has become popular because it provides an outlet for netizens who find blogosphere a liberating place, so unlike Malaysian traditional print which is censored and licensed. This article is an analysis of two blogs written by Malaysian women that show them negotiating in contradictory ways the line between the private and public dimensions of their lives. The idea that the “personal is political” and the importance of experience still retain an important place in feminist contemporary thought. I argue that many seemingly “trivial and personal” issues have produced a politics formed from the bloggers‟ personal experiences and reflections