A Malaysian Case Study

30 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING T he value of any piece of information depends on its relevance, specificity, timeliness, and credibility to the task at hand. In recent years, local social-political (sopo) blogospheres have become an important arena for political mobilization, but qualitatively for an analyst or interested observer, it’s difficult to evaluate information in an unfamiliar blogosphere. Here, we present novel metrics for monitoring an unfamiliar blogosphere and demonstrate their superiority over current metrics. We’ve implemented an automated framework for evaluating information in sopo blogospheres in a way that better reflects their structure. We chose the Malaysian sopo blogosphere as a case study because of the role Malaysian bloggers played leading up to that country’s 2008 general election, and afterward. We developed four independent metrics. To determine the credibility of a blog author’s posts, we use authority (centrality), engagement (user comments), and various credibilityenhancing features that we’ve validated as informing human credibility judgments, such as blogging under a real name, listing affiliations, and blogging over a long time period. We determine a blog post’s relevance, or what it’s about, not only by its text but also by the text of any news article it references. Timeliness, as distinguished from recency, is about proximity to a relevant event. We determine a blog post’s timeliness by comparing its time stamp with the The authors’ automated framework evaluates blog posts in a social-political