Visualization of Influential Blog Networks Using BlogTracker

Abstract

The advent of web 2.0 and social media blogging has enabled researchers to have access to troves of blog data in the 21st century. While platforms and big corporations like Twitter and Facebook can apply the concept of user networks by leveraging internal tools developed by their teams. Researchers and analysts have had to make use of repetitive ways of analyzing blog networks for collected data. This is due to the limited live databases to store and keep track of blog data and the lack of centralized publicly available tools with such capability. When analyzing blog data, the analyst often wants the capability to model relationships and see blogs that share ideological similarities. This is so because blogs always reference each other when they share similarities in content or when they attempt to reinforce a point of view discussed on the medium. Since the blogosphere is made up of a virtual network of blogs - the blogosphere is defined as the network of blogs and has no limitation in blogs referencing one another. It becomes imperative to have a solution that can allow an analyst to visualize the relationships between blogs based on how influential these blogs are when the analyst tracks the discus on the blogs. We address this by providing users with the capability to visualize and analyze blogs that are influential and how connected these blogs are by a way of network visualization. This demonstration shows how the BlogTracker application analyze and visualizes the blog network.