mapping the blogosphere in america cs406 assignment - group presentation 1 mapping the blogosphere...

Mapping the Blogosphere in AmericaCS406 Assignment - Group Presentation

Mapping the Blogosphere in AmericaCS406 Assignment – Group Presentation

Brian McGeeCraig MurrayPiers ThorogoodEmlyn Whittick

Agenda• Summary of the paper• Paper’s key focuses

– Geolocation of blogs– Indexing blogs to city units

• Related Work– Geolocation in general– Alternative mapping of the blogosphere

• Conclusion• Questions

Summary of the Paper

“Mapping the Blogosphere in America”

• Presented at the WWW2004 Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics

• Dr. Alexander Halavais & Dr. Jia Lin• University of Buffalo School of Informatics, NY

Summary of the Paper• Initial phase of a long-term project• Long- term goals:

– Examination of American urban culture– Based on information found in personal blogs– Observe localised political agenda and opinion

• Short- term goals:– Extracting geographic information from blogs– Indexing blogs to ‘city units’

Geolocation of Blogs• No single method to calculate the location

of a blog...• Self- hosted blogs (dedicated domain

name):– Registrant’s address found in domain registry

• Hosted using blog- hosting service:– Location perhaps included in user-profile– Blog perhaps registered with regional blog-

hosting service e.g. ‘NYCblogger.com’

Geolocation of Blogs

• What if there is no explicit location information?

• Answer: Data Mining...– Links to a CV or biography containing

location information– Location found from links to local

weather, school, church or other communities

Geolocation of Blogs• Manual pilot run on 1500 US blogs

– 60% successful identification for self-hosted blogs

– 30% for blogs on blog-hosting sites

• Working on an automatic algorithm• Current approach...

1. GeoURL Metadata, if available2. Whois query for unrecognised domains3. Profile information, if available4. Blogchalking, if available 5. Text on index page (Bio / resume / regionalised links)

Indexing Blogs to City Units• How do we standardise geolocation data?• Varying levels of detail...

– Self- hosted blog: Precise• Street address• 9- digit zip code

– Blog-hosting site: Can be vague• City, state, or even nation• Local links can provide telephone area codes

Indexing Blogs to City Units• How to convert this to a standard unit?• Labelling of by city is vague

– Expansion of city limits– Emergence of ‘second cities’ between big cities

• Requirement for an urban unit– “Geographic clusters consisting of certain sizes

of population sharing physical proximity” [1]

Indexing Blogs to City Units

• The 3- digit zip code– Widely used in marketing and political

strategies– Represents 4 different types of area:

• Metropolitan city• Cluster of suburban cities and towns• Cluster of cities not immediately adjacent to a metropolitan

area• Metropolitan cities plus embedded cities and towns

Indexing Blogs to City Units• Preliminary examination of blog

distribution in the US– Users taken from Livejournal and Diaryland– Both services include location in user profile

• 797 different 3- digit zip codes found• Overall distribution consistent with

population distribution and concentrations of high socio-economic status

Indexing Blogs to City Units

Figure 1. Distribution of blogs in sample [4]

Limitations of the Paper• Authenticity of quoted geographic

information is questionable• 3- digit zip codes

– Overstate the number of bloggers in metropolitan cities

– Many small cities can be grouped into one unit, despite no evidence of common traits or social cohesion.

– Paper suggests dividing units by socio-economic profile

Related Work• Geolocation in general • Non- Geographical Mapping of the

Blogosphere:– Hyperlink Maps– Kohonen Self- Organising Maps

Geolocation• Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

– Geoparsing– Geocoding

• Methods – “Whois” records– Blogging sites requiring registration– Postal addresses and telephone numbers– Geographic feature names– Hyperlinks– Meta data

Geolocation• Uses

– Information retrieval based on geographic criteria

– Tailoring of advertising– Sociological and political trends, mapping the

‘buzz’ of a topic can see which areas are most interested in it

• Problems– Increasing number of mobile devices

Geolocation• Trends

– Blogging hotspots

– More widespread blogging in Eastern US

Figure 2. Blogging Hotspots [6]

• Trends– Analysing blogs by

geography shows where interest lies.

– You can see a correlation between blogs and restaurant locations

Geolocation

Figure 3. Steak n Shake Restaurants [6]

Mapping Blogosphere

• Other methods of mapping the blogosphere:– Mapping hyperlinks– Self- organising maps– Mapping communities

Mapping Hyperlinks

Figure 5. Outbound links [1] Figure 6. Inbound links [1]

• Cybermap showing outbound and inbound links from www.littlegreenfootballs.com in 3D hyperbolic space

Self- Organising Maps• Neural Network like Kohonen SOM’s can

be used to map blogosphere• Advantages

– Performs clustering of input data

– Maps this onto 2D surface for easy visualisation

Figure 7. Kohonen Map of Blogs [7]

Mapping Communities • Location,

friendships and communities are all interrelated

Figure 4. The importance of location interest and age in forming blogging

communities [5]

Conclusion• Summary of the Paper• Geolocation

– Methods– Uses– Trends

• Alternative Mapping Methods– Hyperlink Mapping– Self- Organising Maps

References[1] R. Ackland, “Mapping the U.S. Political Blogosphere: Are Conservative Bloggers

More Prominent?”, 2005.

[2] O. Buyukokkten et al., “Exploiting geographical location information of Webpages” In Proceedings of WebDB-99, the 1999 ACM SIGMOD Workshop on the Weband Databases, 1999.

[3] B. Gueye et al., “Contraint-Based Geolocation of Internet Hosts,” In Proceedings of IMC ’04, Sicily, 2004.

[4] A. Halavais and J. Lin, “Mapping the Blogosphere in America,” In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2004), New York, 2004.

[5] R.Kumar et al., “Structure and Evolution of Blogspace,” In Communications of the ACM, 47:12 pp.35- 39, 2004.

[6] L. Lloyd, P. Kaulgud, and S. Skiena, “Newspapers vs. blogs: Who gets the scoop?” In AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs(AAAI- CAAW), California, 2006.

[7] J. Merelo-Guervos et al., “Mapping weblog communities,” Depto. Arquitectura y Technologia de Computadores, Universidad de Granada, 2006.

mapping the blogosphere in america cs406 assignment - group presentation 1 mapping the blogosphere...

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