Mapping the Blogosphere in America

1. Mapping the Blogosphere in America CS406 Assignment – Group Presentation Brian McGee Craig Murray Piers Thorogood Emlyn Whittick

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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’

5. 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’

6. 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

7. 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... • GeoURL Metadata, if available • Whois query for unrecognised domains • Profile information, if available • Blogchalking, if available • Text on index page (Bio / resume / regionalised links)

8. 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

9. 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]

10. 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

11. 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

12. Indexing Blogs to City Units Figure 1. Distribution of blogs in sample [4]

13. 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

14. Related Work • Geolocation in general • Non- Geographical Mapping of the Blogosphere: • Hyperlink Maps • Kohonen Self- Organising Maps

15. 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

16. 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

17. Geolocation • Trends • Blogging hotspots • More widespread blogging in Eastern US Figure 2. Blogging Hotspots [6]

18. Geolocation • Trends • Analysing blogs by geography shows where interest lies. • You can see a correlation between blogs and restaurant locations Figure 3. Steak n Shake Restaurants [6]

19. Mapping Blogosphere • Other methods of mapping the blogosphere: • Mapping hyperlinks • Self- organising maps • Mapping communities

20. Mapping Hyperlinks Figure 6. Inbound links [1] • Cybermap showing outbound and inbound links from www.littlegreenfootballs.com in 3D hyperbolic space Figure 5. Outbound links [1]

21. 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]

22. Mapping Communities • Location, friendships and communities are all interrelated Figure 4. The importance of location interest and age in forming blogging communities [5]

23. Conclusion • Summary of the Paper • Geolocation • Methods • Uses • Trends • Alternative Mapping Methods • Hyperlink Mapping • Self- Organising Maps

24. 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.