Weblogs or blogs are an important new way to publish information, engage in discussions, and form communities on the Internet. The Blogosphere has unfortunately been infected by several varieties of spam-like content. Blog search engines, for example, are inundated by posts from splogs – false blogs with machine generated or hijacked content whose sole purpose is to host ads or raise the PageRa...

This paper proposes a method to infer bloggers’ residential areas. Identifying bloggers’ residential areas will be useful as another axis to retrieve weblogs or for tasks that resolve ambiguous objects in terms of geographic contexts. Our method focuses on the local context of geographic location terms and uses binary classifiers to decide whether the context is indicating the writer’s resident...

Ausgangspunkt ist die Frage nach der Demokratisierung gesellschaftlicher Prozesse durch das Internet. Im vorgeschlagen Beitrag soll ein kurzer Überblick über die Debatten zu Internet und Politik gegeben werden. Schwerpunkt liegt auf einer Auseinandersetzung mit Entstehung neuer öffentlicher Räume im Internet. Dabei soll sowohl eine theoretische Annäherung an den Begriff der Öffentlichkeit statt...

In this paper we present an approach for identifying network anomalies by visualizing network flow data which is stored in weblogs. Various clustering techniques can be used to identify different anomalies in the network. Here, we present a new approach based on simple K-Means for analyzing network flow data using different attributes like IP address, Protocol, Port number etc. to detect anomal...

With the rapid growth of weblogs (or “blogs”) over the past year, users require a way of rapidly accessing recent content from many different websites. Traditional websites are inadequate for this, as their content and presentation information are inseparably intertwined. This paper describes the development of the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) specifications as a solution for this problem. T...

In this paper we model discussions in online political weblogs (blogs). To do this, we extend Latent Dirichlet Allocation, introduced by Blei et al. (2003), in various ways to capture different characteristics of the data. Our models jointly describe the generation of the primary documents (“posts”) as well as the authorship and, optionally, the contents of the blog community’s verbal reactions...

In this paper we propose an architecture for personalized and context-aware information access in the Semantic Web. We identify different agents and explain how blogs can be utilized to improve information access in this architecture. One ambition is the extraction of semantics from blog entries and other Web resources. We also try to improve trust by exploiting information about user identitie...

In a blog network, there are many relations such as comment, trackback, and so on. We consider that if the relations are related to user’s reading activity, we can extract useful information from the relations for using a recommendation system. We define the strength and type as the measure for relations, and analyze the correlation between those measures and users’ reading activity. We attempt...

This paper describes a follow-up Web 2.0 approach to a technology enhanced master course for students of Graz University of Technology. The lecture “Social Aspects of Information Technology” has a long tradition for using new didactical scenarios as well as modern e-Learning technologies. After using a blogosphere one year ago, this year microblog channels helped to expand the traditional lectu...

In this study, it was investigated whether, and to what extent, Web 2.0 technologies, actually Weblogs, can be a suitable instrument for enhancing the practice of distributed learning. In educational settings, which are based on traditional lectures many students begin serious study shortly before the exam. However, from previous empirical research, it is known that the practice of distributed ...