Justus Bross

Constructing a Context-Aware Service-Oriented Reputation Model Using Attention Allocation Points

In this paper we examine the problem of rich information environments and the need to narrow the agents attention to what is important for them to interact and later to evaluate and transfer reputation values, using Attention Allocation technique (AA). We also argue that this cannot be done without the aid of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Reputation is used in our work as a service, presenting a new concept- that is Reputation-as-a-Service (RaaS). We then present a service-oriented model for optimizing the presentation and the use of reputation in order to maximize its value to both users and providers.

Identifying the top-dogs of the blogosphere

The development of a resilient weblog ranking metric within the global blogosphere, capable of identifying the most important or influential weblogs around, forms the central aspect of this paper. Because well-established ranking algorithms for traditional web pages are not perfectly applicable to the deviant linking characteristics of the blogosphere, blog engines, such as Technorati, BlogPulse or PostRank have developed their own tailor-made ranking metric. This paper will analyze and compare the ranking criteria of these service providers and reveal their conceptional shortcomings and discuss their strengths. Ultimate objective of this paper is to introduce a novel ranking metric, the so-called “BlogIntelligence-Impact-Score” or “BI-Impact” for short. It represents one of the central informational offerings of the forthcoming “BlogIntelligence” portal.

Mapping the Blogosphere with RSS-Feeds

The massive adoption of social media has provided new ways for individuals to express their opinions online. The blogosphere, an inherent part of this trend, contains a vast array of information about a variety of topics. It is thus a huge think tank that creates an enormous and ever-changing archive of open source intelligence. Modeling and mining this vast pool of data to extract, exploit and describe meaningful knowledge in order to leverage (content-related) structures and dynamics of emerging networks within the blogosphere is the higher-level aim of the research presented here. This paper focuses on this project’s initial phase, in which the above-mentioned data of interest needs to be collected and made available offline for further analyses. Our proprietary development of a tailor-made feed-crawler meets exactly this need. The main concept, the techniques and the implementation details of the crawler thus form the main interest of this paper and furthermore provide the basis for future project phases.

Mapping the Blogosphere--Towards a Universal and Scalable Blog-Crawler

The massive adoption of social media has provided new ways for individuals to express their opinions online. The blogosphere, an inherent part of this trend, contains a vast array of information about a variety of topics. Thus, it is a huge think tank that creates an enormous and ever-changing archive of open source intelligence. Modeling and mining this vast pool of data to extract and describe meaningful knowledge in order to leverage (content-related) structures and dynamics of emerging networks within the blogo sphere is the higher-level aim of the research presented here. While the concept of our tailor-mode feed-crawler was already discussed in two earlier publications this paper focuses on our approach to extend the earlier feed crawler to a more universal and highly scalable blog-crawler.

Visualizing Blog Archives to Explore Content- and Context-Related Interdependencies

There has been virtually little in the way of user interfaces designed for the exploration and information gathering from large weblog datasets to allow for an integrated and aggregated knowledge collection and information analysis tool. Users have to rely on their own capability to find, select or filter entries and navigate through a blog archive. For weblogs with a large collection of entries this task easily becomes tedious, since current blog interfaces lack fundamental support for facilitating the exploration of their archives. A solution to this problem could be POSTCONNECT, a mature blog-archive visualization tool presented in this paper.

Spurring Design Thinking through Educational Weblogging

A growing number of those millions of internet users that are down to the present day excessively using weblogs to reflect on their experiences, recommendations and thoughts in a private or business context, now increasingly employ this medium to bring the teaching- and learning- environment to a new level. The use case about the D-School-Blog - a collaborative working and communication platform to support the innovative process of Design Thinking (DT)- presented in this paper, proves the applicability of weblogs in this particular environment.

Can VoIP Live up to the QoS Standards of Traditional Wireline Telephony

The PSTN is the ultimate benchmark for voice quality in communication networks. When the first VoIP solution was introduced in 1996, the Internets audio transport capabilities were far below the benchmark set by public-network standards and therefore much lower per-forming than traditional telephony. Considering that Internet Telephony is constantly being promoted as the next killer application in Next Generation Networks and as the potential substitute for current telephony technologies, voice quality however needs to at least be equal to the level ISDN telephony provides at the moment. The following comparison of VoIP and traditional telephony QoS levels and their corresponding performance development revealed the following: QoS of Internet Telephony was intolerably low when first introduced, compared to the standards set by the traditional telephony. However, these shortcomings were largely factored out and optimised through numerous QoS enhancing methods, meaningful traffic engineering and network planning. This paper proves that QoS of todays VoIP solutions is fully satisfactory for end-users and that VoIP therefore constitutes a potential substitute for traditional telephony services.

RSS-Crawler Enhancement for Blogosphere-Mapping

The massive adoption of social media has provided new ways for individuals to express their opinions online. The blogosphere, an inherent part of this trend, contains a vast array of information about a variety of topics. It is a huge think tank that creates an enormous and ever-changing archive of open source intelligence. Mining and modeling this vast pool of data to extract, exploit and describe meaningful knowledge in order to leverage structures and dynamics of emerging networks within the blogosphere is the higher-level aim of the research presented here. Our proprieteary development of a tailor-made feed-crawler-framework meets exactly this need. While the main concept, as well as the basic techniques and implementation details of the crawler have already been dealt with in earlier publications, this paper focuses on several recent optimization efforts made on the crawler framework that proved to be crucial for the performance of the overall framework.

Social Physics of the Blogosphere

It was already shown on several occasions that it can be highly meaningful for individuals, institutions or even governments to find ways and measures in order to extract reliable and insightful trends, opinions or partic- ular pieces of information out of the blogosphere. However, it is increasingly difficult if not impossible for the average internet user and sympathizer of we blogs to grasp the blogosphere’s complexity as a whole, due to thousands of new weblogs and an almost uncountable number of new posts adding up to the before-mentioned collective on a daily basis. Mining, analyzing, mod- cling and presenting this vast pool of knowledge in one central framework to extract, exploit and represent meaningful knowledge for the common blog user forms the basis of this paper. The result of the corresponding long-term research initiative presented here is BLOGIXTELLIGEXCE. It is an inte- grated blog analysis framework with the objective to leverage content- and context-related structures and dynamics residing in the blogosphere and to make these findings available in an appropriate format to anyone interested. We hereafter refer to these structures and dynamics as social physics of the blogosphere.

Weblogs, a Promising New Form for E-democracy?

Over the last 15 years, there has been a gradually increasing awareness of the need to consider innovative applications of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) for participation that enables a wider audience to actively contribute to democratic decision-making. There is reason enough to believe that ICT can indeed change politics. Especially the Weblog technology seems to have that potential in certain countries, as the following research proposal suggests. Why not in Germany?