The Blogosphere at a Glance — Content-Based Structures Made Simple

A network representation based on a basic wordoverlap similarity measure between blogs is introduced. The simplicity of the representation renders it computationally tractable, transparent and insensitive to representation-dependent artifacts. Using Swedish blog data, we demonstrate that the representation, in spite of its simplicity, manages to capture important structural properties of the content in the blogosphere. First, blogs that treat similar subjects are organized in distinct network clusters. Second, the network is hierarchically organized as clusters in turn form higher-order clusters: a compound structure reminiscent of a blog taxonomy

The Pulse of News in Social Media: Forecasting Popularity

News articles are extremely time sensitive by nature. There is also intense competition among news items to propagate as widely as possible. Hence, the task of predicting the popularity of news items on the social web is both interesting and challenging. Prior research has dealt with predicting eventual online popularity based on early popularity. It is most desirable, however, to predict the popularity of items prior to their release, fostering the possibility of appropriate decision making to modify an article and the manner of its publication. In this paper, we construct a multi-dimensional feature space derived from properties of an article and evaluate the efficacy of these features to serve as predictors of online popularity. We examine both regression and classification algorithms and demonstrate that despite randomness in human behavior, it is possible to predict ranges of popularity on twitter with an overall 84% accuracy. Our study also serves to illustrate the differences between traditionally prominent sources and those immensely popular on the social web

Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters

Conversations on Twitter create networks with identifiable contours as people reply to and mention one another in their tweets. These conversational structures differ, depending on the subject and the people driving the conversation. Six structures are regularly observed: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spoke structures. These are created as individuals choose whom to reply to or mention in their Twitter messages and the structures tell a story about the nature of the conversatio

How and why physicists and chemists use blogs

This study examined how and why chemists and physicists blog. Two qualitative methods were used: content analysis of blog and “about” pages and in-depth responsive interviews with chemists and physicists who maintain blogs. Analysis of the data yielded several cross-cutting themes that provide a window into how physicists and chemists use their blogs and what value they receive from maintaining a blog and participating in a blogging community. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for supporting scientists’ work

The Tumblarians

This paper examines the tumblarians as an information community and discusses community membership, information behaviours, and complementary models for a situated understanding of this unique personal-professional community. A review of the literature concerning LIS bloggers is presented as a complement to the tumblarians, who have no in depth treatment in the research as yet. Characteristics particular to the tumblarians are explored through informal conversation with a community member, and Fisher, Unruh, and Durrance\u27s (2003) information communities model is employed to provide a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of the tumblarians. This paper offers suggestions for future research based on the preliminary findings of the tumblarians as LIS bloggers and a virtual community

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design