Justus Broß

Visualizing the Blogosphere with BlogConnect

It can be highly meaningful for individuals, institutions and even governments to extract reliable and insightful trends, opinions or particular pieces of information out of the network single web logs are embedded in - the blogo sphere. However, there has been virtually little in the way of user interfaces designed for the exploration and information gathering from the blogo sphere as a whole to allow for an integrated knowledge collection and information extraction tool. Users have to rely on their own capability to find, select or filter entries and navigate through this complex network, a task that can easily become tedious. An approach to solve this problem could be BLOGCONNECT presented in the following, a tool to visualize the inherent network characteristics of and the aggregated knowledge pool of the blogosphere.

Implementing a corporate weblog for SAP

After web 2.0 technologies experienced a phenomenal expansion and high acceptance among private users, considerations are now intensified to assess whether they can be equally applicable, beneficially employed and meaningfully implemented in an entrepreneurial context. The fast-paced rise of social software like weblogs or wikis and the resulting new form of communication via the Internet is however observed ambiguously in the corporate environment. This is why the particular choice of the platform or technology to be implemented in this field is strongly dependent on its future business case and field of deployment and should therefore be carefully considered beforehand, as this paper strongly suggests.

The Challenge of Exploring the Blogosphere

We know that single weblogs are embedded into a complex superstructure known as the blogosphere. However, the absence of any centralized control, usually regarded as the blogosphere’s best feature, is its major shortcoming in this context: Aggregating and analyzing this vast pool of unstructured information in one central framework has seemed to be virtually impossible up to now.

Overview of the Continents of the Blogosphere

To deal with the blogosphere in general requires a deep understanding of its smallest entities, individual weblogs, including their technical features and specifications. This knowledge (refer to Chap. 2) would remain entirely abstract if not tested under real conditions. On the basis of five different blog projects presented in the following chapters, we will substantiate that blogs can actually be employed in any imaginable environment as long as it is perfectly clear that any potential field of application requires a unique set of preconditions, whether these be moderation, privacy issues, technical adaptations, a full understanding of diverse target audiences, or issues concerning the actual blog contents.

Judging Consistency and Expertise of Blogs

The general set of analysis techniques required to understand the blogosphere have already been described earlier in Chap. 12 Here we turn to more detailed anaylsis concepts and in a similar way to the trend analysis concepts described above in Chap. 15, each of these can be seen as an independent extension of the BLOGINTELLIGENCE platform that uses the existing crawler and analysis techniques.

Towards an Exploration Machine for the Blogosphere

The analysis of data generated within and from the blogosphere’s network can be insightful for numerous reasons and for a high diversity of interest groups. As noted in previous chapters, the blogosphere represents a part of the WWW that dynamically evolves and functions according to its own rules. These different characteristics are the foremost reason why existing mining and analysis methods developed for general use in the web could not be equally applied to the blogosphere [CXC+09]. For this reason we set out to develop our own exploration machine, called BLOGINTELLIGENCE, which comprises the three main components Extraction, Analysis and Visualization as outlined in Fig. 10.1.

Continent of Docu-Blogs Use Case: The IT-Gipfelblog

The Internet is not the first innovation which people have expected to lead to an enhanced sense of togetherness, understanding and even world peace. After the establishment of the first stable telegraphic connection, both radio and television have subsequently been supercharged with such utopian expectations, only to be rapidly demystified thereafter. The Internet is no different. Nicholas Negroponte, an early visionary of web culture, still prophesized in 1997 that the Internet would overcome nationalism and create world peace [Neg97]. Since then, however, all kinds of radical groups and unions have been quick to instrumentalize the new medium for their causes, putting an end to such romantic expectations. The Internet differs from its predecessors in communications technology in a fundamental way: It is a decentralized technology and the first medium ever to function without a vulnerable core which makes it impossible to control. Until now, no government – not even the Chinese leadership through its nationwide firewall – has managed to bring this digital network under its control [Neg97, Bla08]. This unique characteristic is the reason why the dream of the digital democracy (hereafter referred to as e-Democracy ), and a society free of the influence of manipulated media and lobbyism, stays alive [Mac04]. In the US, for instance, the Internet has become the primary source of information for the majority of citizens. According to the Spew Center for the People and the Press in Washington D.C., the Internet is already the most important contact point for news about electoral campaigns for the age group between 18 and 29 years [Pew08]. This is not only beneficial to the websites of traditional media corporations but also particularly important for weblogs and big social networking platforms like myspace.com, facebook.com or youtube.com. The focus here is not only on clicks. While the Clinton campaign was focusing on big campaign contributions, the campaign of Barack Obama mobilized over a million small-time donors through the use of the Internet [Bla08]. This illustrates that even though it might be too early to speak about real e-Democracy, the Internet nevertheless has a strong influence on political campaigns. How exactly can the participative character of the Web 2.0 enhance or enable democratic decision making processes and which ICT is the most suitable to achieve maximum success in this regard?

The BLOGINTELLIGENCE Portal

The BLOGINTELLIGENCE portal1 is the central hub for every tool, functionality and overall service presented in this book (see Fig. 14.1). Its design and content was carefully analyzed during previous research and ultimately realized to provide both an appealing user interface and the greatest level of usability possible for potential users when exploring the information services provided.

Continent of Corporate-Blogs: Use Case – SAP Blog

Successful enterprises attribute part of their success to effective internal communication which most employees would describe as direct and open communication with their management. These internal open channels of communication create an atmosphere of respect where co-worker and manager-employee relationships can flourish, keep employees interested in their jobs, circulate vital information as quickly as possible and connect employees with the company’s goals and vision [HM09, CG05, Arg09]. In this section we describe our experiences based on corporate blog project for the German leading software company SAP 4 years ago.

Introduction: The Blogosphere

Our main goal is to show new ways and means to extract reliable and valuable knowledge of the blogosphere. Following an abstract view of the blogosphere from two different angles, we dive deeper into the diverse varieties of blogs and introduce some interesting ones. Then, we continue our journey by collecting requirements for retrieving new knowledge and showing the path from content collection to data mining and knowledge visualization. After this we present a tool that actively supports the extraction of knowledge and show two mining functionalities included in the aforementioned tool. At the end, we will discuss our expectations for the future trends of the blogosphere and social media analytics in general.