Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem

As seen on Ethan and Kathy's blogs

2005-05-11T10:07:00.000-07:00

Two of our speakers have posted excellent summaries of several of the workshop presentations.

Kathy Gill summarized the keynote talk by Ethan Zuckerman here.
She also recorded the talks on her iPod and has made the recordings available via an RSS feed.

Ethan Zuckerman summarized several other presentations here and here.

Differences between Blogs and Web Diaries

2005-05-10T16:20:00.000-07:00

Toshiaki Fujiki (speaker), Tomoyuki Nanno, and Manabu Okumura

There had been many "web diaries" before the blogs arrived in Japan. In this paper, we discuss whether the differences between blogs and "web diaries" are significant for text mining or not. We conducted experiments to find the differences by comparing hot topic words automatically extracted from blogs and web diaries. The results suggested that we could obtain better results by using blogs and web diaries together rather than by only using the RSS data of blogs.

Paper

Presented by Toshiaki Fujiki, Tokyo Institute of
Technology

Blogging, RSS and the Information Landscape: A Look at Online News

2005-05-10T16:00:00.000-07:00

Kathy Gill, University of Washington

This paper explores the effect that blogs have had on the adoption of RSS syndication by online news web sites. It uses the diffisuion of innovation models presented in Everett Rogers' The Diffusion of Innovation and Brian Winston's Media, Technology and Society to explain the relationship between RSS, blogs, and online news.

Paper

Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics

2005-05-10T15:10:00.000-07:00

Paolo Avesani (speaker), Marco Cova, Conor Hayes, and Paolo Massa

In this paper, we examine how a topic-centric view of the Blogosphere can be created. We characterise the problems in aligning similar concepts created by a set of distributed, autonomous users and describe current iniatives to solve the problem. We introduce the Tagsocratic project, a novel initiave to solve the concept alignment problem using techniques derived from research in language acquisition among distributed, autonomous agents.

Presented by Paolo Avesani, I.R.S.T.

Paper

Analyzing concerns of people using Weblog articles and real world temporal data

2005-05-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

Tomohiro Fukuhara (speaker), Toshihiro Murayama, and Toyoaki Nishida

We describe an apprach and some preliminary results of concern analysis using Weblog and real world temporal data. By analyzing Weblog articles, we can find temporal changes of concerns of people.

Presented by Tomohiro Fukuhara, RISTEX

Paper

GIS and the Blogosphere

2005-05-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

Matt Hurst

This paper describes some baseline experiments in relating bloggers to geographical locations. It describes an application of simple Geographical Information Systems methods to the results of a naive location identifying technology, drawing some interesting insights about the distribution of bloggers.

Presented by Matt Hurst, Intelliseek and BlogPulse

Paper

The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog

2005-05-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

Lada A. Adamic and Natalie Glance (speaker)

In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Most significantly, we find differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern.

Presented by Natalie Glance, Intelliseek and BlogPulse

Paper

Lunch at Arigato, an okonomiyaki restaurant

2005-05-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

Belle Tseng and Jumichi Tatemura

Ethan Zuckerman, Andrew Tomkins, Paolo Avesani and Masashi Toyoda

Tomographic Clustering To Visualize Blog Communities as Mountain Views

2005-05-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

Belle L. Tseng (speaker), Junichi Tatemura, Yi Wu

In our paper, we combine blog rankings with their social connections to provide a framework to understand multiple blog communities. A novel mountain view visualization is provided to explore different communities of interest in blogspace. The mountain views are generated using a tomographic clustering algorithm on the blog social network.

Presented by Belle Tseng, NEC

Paper

The EigenRumor Algorithm for Ranking Blogs

2005-05-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

Ko Fujimura (speaker), Takafumi Inoue, and Masayuki Sugisaki

This paper proposes a new algorithm called "EigenRumor" that scores each blog entry based on eigenvector calculations. This algorithm enables a higher score to be assigne to the blog entries submitted by a good blogger but not yet linked to by any other blogs based on acceptance of the blogger's prior work.

Presented by Ko Fujimura, NTT Corporation

Paper

Views from the audience

2005-05-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

Discovering Important Bloggers Based on a Blog Thread Analysis

2005-05-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

Shinsuke Nakajima (speaker), Junichi Tatemura, Yoichiro Hino, Yoshinori Hara, and Katsumi Tanaka

Abstract: To capture "hot" conversation topics from blogs and deliver them to users in a timely manner, we propose a method of discovering bloggers who take an important role in conversations. We characterize bloggers based on their roles in previous blog threads (a set of blog entries comprises a conversation). We discuss models of blogs and blog thread data, and methods of extracting blog threads, discovering important bloggers, and acquiring important content from their entries.

Presented by: Shinsuke Nakajima, NICT

Paper

Extracting Latent Weblog Communities: A Partitioning Algorithm for Bipartite Graphs

2005-05-10T10:15:00.000-07:00

Kazunari Ishida

I propose the concept of a latent weblog community (LBC), as a means to promote the automomous organizaiton of knowledge on the Internet. Such communities can be illustrated in terms of bipartite graphs based on weblog update information, and they can effectively function to create meeting spaces for bloggers who write about similar or closely related topics but do not know each other. To extract these communities from blogspace, I developed a partioning algorithm known as the Weakest Pair (WP) algorithm, which separates the weakest pairs of bloggers and webpages, respectively, using co-citation information.

Presented by Kazunari Ishida, Tokyo University of Agriculture

Paper

Podcast of Ethan Zuckerman's Keynote Talk

2005-05-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

This is an experiment! Podcast RSS Feed. If this fails (heh), get the mp3 with a direct download.

Media Attention in the Age of the Weblog - Will Blogs Make News More or Less Global?

2005-05-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

Ethan Zuckerman

Abstract: Weblogs are revolutionizing journalism, allowing a new group of amateur citizen journalists to complement and challenge professional journalists. How are news stories flowing from mainstream media into weblogs, and vice versa? Is there a pattern to what stories bloggers "amplify" from mainstream media? Will weblogs be able to help journalism conquer one of its most persistent problems - a failure to report news from the developing world? Or will the demographic biases of webloggers help reinforce mass media's tendencies to report on wealthy nations? My talk explores these questions (and the history behind them), presents ongoing research and explores new strategies for investigating these questions.

Welcome

2005-05-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the 2nd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem. The workshop starts May 10th in Chiba Japan as part of the WWW2005 conference. The workshop information and schedule are available here.

Theme of the Workshop

The weblogging microcosm has evolved into a distinct form, into a community of publishers. The strong sense of community amongst bloggers distinguishes weblogs from the various forms of online publications such as online journals, 'zines and newsletters that flourished in the early days of the web and from traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television. The use of weblogs primarily for publishing, as opposed to discussion, differentiates blogs from other online community forums, such as Usenet newsgroups and message boards. Often referred to as the blogsphere, the network of bloggers is a thriving ecosystem, with its own internally driven dynamics.

The cross-linking that takes place between blogs, through blogrolls, explicit linking, trackbacks, and referrals creates implicit and explicit networks which define the communities of the weblogging world. create a strong sense of community in the weblogging world. There is work underway to understand the dynamics of the weblogging network, much of which springs from bloggers themselves. The self-publishing aspect of weblogs, the time-stamped entries, the highly interlinked nature of the blogging community and the significant impact of weblog content on politics, ideas, and culture make them a fascinating subject of study.