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Blog searching and Web 2.0 Technologies: New Insights into Customers/Citizens/Voters?
Mike ThelwallStatistical Cybermetrics Research Group
Web Impact Audits
Contents
Background Blogs Online news sources RSS
Tracking public science debatesDetecting public science debates
Background
Blogs, public opinion, online news, RSS
Background
There are millions of bloggersAutomatically tracking bloggers’ postings may give insights into public opinion
Blogs, MySpace etc…
‘A list’ blogs boing boingPolitical blogs Baghdad BurningJournalist blogs Tech BlogCorporate blogs Official Google BlogSemi-pro blogs blog to make moneyBlogs 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 consumer-
generated 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 click-search graphs Stem cell research GM food Mobile phone radiation cartoons AND (denmark or danish)
Mozdeh – Blog analysis
Research blog analysis projectGives 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 researchSpot 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 usageManual scanning of top words to identify genuine topics
Top science concern words
Word Max. daily increase (feeds)
Classification
stem 19% Science fear (stem cell research)
orlean 16% Information (about hurricane)
CISCO 14% Router security fears
Schiavo 12% Life support machines
7.5% of the top 200 terms were new relevant debates
Other tools: Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trendshttp://www.google.com/trends?hl=zh-cnhttp://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 firstgeneral-purpose source of retrospective public opinion inthe social sciences? Online Information Review.