VizBlog: a discovery tool for the blogosphere

Web logs (or blogs) have become a means for citizens to share opinions and deliberate on local issues. However, the large number of blogs makes finding and exploring content of interest relatively difficult. We are developing a tool to display citizen-tocitizen discussion in blogs and to reveal some similarity across blog entries. Through association and content analysis, blog entries are linked to each other to form clusters of related local content. Users can navigate and explore online discussions by manipulating the graph, filtering content, and clicking on different parts of the graph. The visualization of online discussion can promote participation by highlighting ‘the buzz’ of popular topics and laying out the structure of conversations. In this demo, we will show our tool in use with a digest of regional Southwest Virginia blogs.