BlogTrackers: A Tool for Sociologists to Track and Analyze Blogosphere

We present a tool BlogTrackers, which assists sociologists to track and analyze blogs of particular interests by designing and integrating unique features. We present an overview of BlogTrackers, illustrate its functions of various components of BlogTrackers, and outline future work for expansion in meeting the growing needs of sociologists. Introduction Blogosphere, the network of blogs, is growing at a phenomenal rate. Technorati has indexed around 133 million blog records. Sociologists are interested in studying the blogosphere for tracking socio-behavioral patterns, identifying the influential people in the region of interest and tracking interesting activities. They often have to eyeball the sites for useful information. Given a gamut of interests in the blogosphere, this can be a tedious and time consuming task. Through this user-oriented application, we propose to alleviate this problem by assisting them in effectively tracking and analyzing blogosphere. BlogTrackers grants sociologists the freedom to choose the blog sites they wish to analyze, observe interesting events and patterns with the flexibility of drilling-in. The tool consists of a number of analyzing and crawling modules and is a convenient alternative to eyeballing the blog sites and concentrate efforts on further analysis. Most tools are generic in nature and cannot be directly used by sociologists and others with specific needs. BlogTrackers is particularly designed for their needs that can perform both data collection and provide convenient visualizing tools to analyze the data. Table 1 presents a comparison of BlogTrackers with some of the existing tools in the domain. Although, sites like Technorati and BlogPulse provide features similar to our tool, they cannot be directly used. BlogTrackers combines them in a unique manner to maximize the analytical capability of the individual techniques. Apart from these tools there is also some generic visualization software that do not target blogs per se but can be used to do some analysis on the blog data. Pajek is a visualization tool that can be used to visualize the network !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/ Copyright © 2009, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. data in various ways. IBM’s ManyEyes is another interesting project on generic visualizations but suffers from scalability issues. The Prefuse visualization toolkit contains a set of unique visualizations for the data. BlogTrackers BlogTrackers is a Java based desktop application that provides a unified platform for the user to crawl and analyze blog data. It grants the user, the freedom to choose the data of interest and helps in effectively analyzing it. The data is stored in a relational database. Currently we are tracking 10 different data sources like Twitter, Engadget, The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), LiveJournal, etc.