Discovering Important Bloggers based on Analyzing Blog Threads

Abstract

A blog (weblog) lets people promptly publish content (such as comments) relating to other blogs through hyperlinks. This type of web content can be considered as a conversation rather than a collection of archived document. To capture ’hot’ conversation topics from blogs and deliver them to users in a timely manner, we propose a method of discovering bloggers who take an important role in conversations. We characterize bloggers based on their roles in previous blog threads (a set of blog entries comprises a conversation),. We provide several definitions of bloggers’ roles including (1) agitators who stimulate discussion, and (2) summarizers who provide summaries of the discussion. We consider that these bloggers are likely to be useful in identifying hot conversations. In this paper, we discuss models of blogs and blog thread data, and methods of extracting blog threads, discovering important bloggers, and acquiring important content from their entries.