Domain-specific identification of topics and trends in the blogosphere

Abstract

Staying tuned to the trends and opinions in a certain domain is an important task in many areas. E. g., market researchers want to know about the acceptance of products. Traditionally this is done by screening broadcast media, but in recent years social media like the blogosphere have gained more and more importance. As manual screening of the blogosphere is a tedious task, automated knowledge discovery techniques for trend analysis and topic detection are needed. Our system "Social Media Miner" supports professionals in these tasks. The system aggregates relevant blog articles in a specified domain from blog search services, analyzes their link structure and their importance, provides an overview of the most active topics and identifies general trends in the area. For every topic it gives the analyst access to the most relevant articles. Experiments show that our system achieves a high degree of sound automated processing. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.