Blog data analytics using blogtrackers

Abstract

Social media has grown to be the place for voicing one's opinions, shareinformation, and shape discourse. Individuals use social media as a platform to mobilize,coordinate, and conduct cyber campaigns ranging from awareness for diseases ordisorders to deviant acts threatening democratic principles and institutions. Blogospherehas continued to rise and afford an effective medium for content framing. With norestriction on the number of characters, many use blogs to set narratives then use othersocial media channels like Twitter and Facebook to steer their audience to their blogs.Blog content is not structured and hard to collect than other social media channels. Blogmonitoring and analysis could be of great use to sociologists, political scientists,communication researchers, journalists and information scientists to examine events.Toward this direction, we present Blogtrackers tool, which is designed to explore theblogosphere and gain insights on various events. Blogtrackers can help in identifyingleading information actors, influential bloggers, popular and emerging trends, assesstones, sentiments and opinions, extract entities, and analyze their networks.