The rise of the blogosphere has empowered the average consumer to influence the public perception and profitability of brands. As such, marketing organizations need to be aware of what people are saying in influential blogs, how the expressed opinions could impact their business, and how to extract business insight and value from these blogs. This has given rise to the emerging discipline of So...

Political blogs as a form of social media allow for an uniquely interactive form of political discourse. This is especially evident in focused blogs with a strong ideological identity. We investigate techniques to identify topics within the context of the community, which when discussed in a blog post evoke a discernible positive or negative collective opinion from readers who respond to posts ...

We observe the statistical properties of blogs that are expected to reflect social human interaction. Firstly, we introduce a basic normalization preprocess that enables us to evaluate the genuine word frequency in blogs that are independent of external factors such as spam blogs, server-breakdowns, increase in the population of bloggers, and periodic weekly behaviors. After this process, we ca...

With the increasing of blog users, the traditional blog search can no longer meet their demands. More work should be done to accommodate the need of finding good blogs to read, besides the topicrelevant blogs. This paper focuses on the problem of an in-depth faceted blog distillation for addressing the quality aspect of the retrieval blogs. We propose a novel L-Qtf coefficient and LQE model to ...

Consumer generated media, particularly blogs, can help companies in increasing the visibility of their products without spending millions of dollars in advertising. While a number of companies realize the potential of blogs and encourage their employees to blog; a good chunk of them are skeptical about losing control over to this new media. Companies fear that employees may write negative thing...

C media, particularly blogs, can help companies increase the visibility of their products without spending millions of dollars in advertising. Although a number of companies realize the potential of blogs and encourage their employees to blog, a good chunk of them are skeptical about losing control over this new media. Companies fear that employees may write negative things about them and that ...

1 Partial support was provided by NSF awards ITR-IIS-0326460 and ITR-IDM-0219649 and funding from I.B.M. Contact the authors as {akale1,kolari1,aks1,finin,joshi}@cs.umbc.edu ABSTRACT There is a growing interest in exploring the role of social networks to understand how communities and individuals spread influence. In a densely connected online world, social media and networks have a great poten...

Blogspace is one of the most dynamic areas of today’s Internet, and it is increasingly recognised that blogs are much more than “meaningless chatter”. Many syntaxbased approaches exist to analyse the text and the network structure between blogs. While this is very helpful for purposes such as the detection of discussion bursts concerning uniquely-named topics (e.g., a book, product, or person),...

Though still a small subsection of the internet, weblogs are becoming an increasingly prominent space for finding and discussing information in particular political information. But because of their newness, the question remains as to what are the possible implications of political blogs on people’s current information reality. As a way to better understand political blogs as a space for gainin...