Mining the blogosphere for sociological inferences

Abstract

The blogosphere, which is the name given to the universe of all blog sites, is now a collection of a tremendous amount of user generated data. The ease & simplicity of creating blog posts and their free form and unedited nature have made the blogosphere a rich and unique source of data, which has attracted people and companies across disciplines to exploit it for varied purposes. The large volume of data requires developing appropriate automated techniques for searching and mining useful inferences from the blogosphere. The valuable data contained in posts from a large number of users across geographic, demographic and cultural boundaries provide a rich opportunity for not only commercial exploitation but also for cross-cultural psychological & sociological research. This paper tries to present the broader picture in and around this theme, chart the required academic and technological framework for the purpose and presents initial results of an experimental work to demonstrate the plausibility of the idea. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.