Social Physics of the Blogosphere Capturing, Analyzing and Presenting Interdependencies within a Single Framework

Abstract

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. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Wien.