Transcript Presentation

Blog searching and Web 2.0
Technologies: New Insights into
Customers/Citizens/Voters?
Mike Thelwall
Statistical Cybermetrics Research
Group
Web Impact Audits
Contents
Background



Blogs
Online news sources
RSS
Tracking public science debates
Detecting public science debates
Background
Blogs, public opinion, online news,
RSS
Background
There are millions of bloggers
Automatically tracking bloggers’
postings may give insights into public
opinion
Blogs, MySpace etc…
‘A list’ blogs boing boing
Political blogs Baghdad Burning
Journalist blogs Tech Blog
Corporate blogs Official Google Blog
Semi-pro blogs blog to make money
Blogs of social sites like MySpace and
LiveJournal
Blog tracking companies
IBM

WebFountain qualitative and quantitative analysis
of the Web, intranet data, and other sources
Nielsen Buzzmetrics


BlogPulse
“Monitor, measure and leverage consumergenerated media”
Market sentinel


supplier of blog and web monitoring services
identifies the sources that companies should
monitor to take business decisions
RSS Format
Rich Site Syndication/Really Simple
Syndication


XML technology
Used for frequently updated information sources
(blogs, news, academic journals)
RSS Readers



Users subscribe to the RSS feeds of favourite
blogs/sites/journals/searches
Notified when updates available
User-controlled ‘push’ technology
Tracking Debates in Blogs
Case study: Public science debates
Blog keyword searches
Technorati “Searches weblogs by keyword
and for links”

Nokia
Blogdigger

stem cell research
IceRocket


Allows Advanced searches
Allows genuine date range search (Google only
allows “last updated” date range searches)
Track evolution over time
What is changing about interest in Stem cell
research/GM food?
Are experts good at identifying changes in
public interest?
How can experts be sure/can they be
supported with quantitative information?
Can blogs be used to generate time series
reflecting changes in “public interest”?
Free science debate graphs
Solves the trend identification problem?
Blogpulse Offers free automatic blog
searches and keyword-generated clicksearch graphs




Stem cell research
GM food
Mobile phone radiation
cartoons AND (denmark or danish)
Mozdeh – Blog analysis
Research blog analysis project
Gives control over the data source
Detecting Debates in Blogs
Case study: Public science debates
How to detect a new debate?
Heuristic methods

E.g. Read papers, scan relevant blogs
Automatic methods

E.g. look for sudden increase in usage of
science-related words in blogs?
Free hot topic searches
Blog keyword search (sort by date)

Technorati “Searches weblogs by keyword and for links”
 Stem cell research

Blogdigger stem cell research
Spot graph spikes in broad topic search

Blogpulse
Hot topic searches


Blogdex – [deceased] (hot topics)
Bloglines – [an ex-service] (most popular links)
Searches find the really big science debates?
Specialist research tools
Commercial software

Intelliseek/IBM
Mozdeh RSS monitor




Generates sub-collections
Generates word time series
Allows keyword searches
Identifies hot topics
Science concern corpus
A collection of postings containing a fear
word AND a science word, matching the
search:

(science OR scientist OR research OR researcher)
AND (fear OR afraid OR worry)
Trend detection used to identify hot “science
fear” topics- words with sudden increases in
usage
Manual scanning of top words to identify
genuine topics
Top science concern words
Word
CISCO
Max. daily
Classification
increase (feeds)
19%
Science fear (stem
cell research)
16%
Information (about
hurricane)
14%
Router security fears
Schiavo
12%
stem
orlean
Life support
machines
7.5% of the top 200 terms were new relevant debates
Other tools: Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends
http://www.google.com/trends?hl=zhcn
http://www.google.com/trends/music
Conclusions
Many free tools support exploration of
“Consumer Generated Media”
Many opportunities for exploration and
new types of social science research
Thelwall, M. (2007, to appear). Blog searching: The first
general-purpose source of retrospective public opinion in
the social sciences? Online Information Review.