Tomographic Clustering To Visualize Blog Communities as Mountain Views

Blogs have created a fast growing social network on the Internet. However ranking solutions are not sufficient to capture relationships between important blogs and between communities. In our paper, we combine blog rankings with their social connections to provide a framework to understand multiple blog communities. A novel mountain view visualization is provided to explore different communities of interest in blogspace. The mountain views are generated using a tomographic clustering algorithm on the blog social network. The mountain view shows mountains of communities consisting of connected blogs. Peaks and valleys of the mountain view depict representative blogs as community authorities and community connectors, respectively. We developed a retrieval and exploratory system to illustrate this framework, and perform initial experiments to validate the results.