Blog searching and Web 2.0 Technologies: New Insights into Customers/Citizens/Voters?

Mike ThelwallStatistical Cybermetrics Research Group

Web Impact Audits

Contents

Background Blogs Online news sources RSS

Tracking public science debatesDetecting public science debates

Background

Blogs, public opinion, online news, RSS

Background

There are millions of bloggersAutomatically tracking bloggers’ postings may give insights into public opinion

Blogs, MySpace etc…

‘A list’ blogs boing boingPolitical blogs Baghdad BurningJournalist blogs Tech BlogCorporate blogs Official Google BlogSemi-pro blogs blog to make moneyBlogs of social sites like MySpace and LiveJournal

Blog tracking companies

IBM WebFountain qualitative and quantitative

analysis of the Web, intranet data, and other sources

Nielsen Buzzmetrics BlogPulse “Monitor, measure and leverage consumer-

generated media”Market sentinel supplier of blog and web monitoring services identifies the sources that companies should

monitor to take business decisions

RSS Format

Rich Site Syndication/Really Simple Syndication XML technology Used for frequently updated information

sources (blogs, news, academic journals)

RSS Readers Users subscribe to the RSS feeds of

favourite blogs/sites/journals/searches Notified when updates available User-controlled ‘push’ technology

Tracking Debates in Blogs

Case study: Public science debates

Blog keyword searches

Technorati “Searches weblogs by keyword and for links” Nokia

Blogdigger stem cell research

IceRocket Allows Advanced searches Allows genuine date range search (Google only

allows “last updated” date range searches)

Track evolution over time

What is changing about interest in Stem cell research/GM food?Are experts good at identifying changes in public interest?How can experts be sure/can they be supported with quantitative information?Can blogs be used to generate time series reflecting changes in “public interest”?

Free science debate graphs

Solves the trend identification problem?Blogpulse Offers free automatic blog searches and keyword-generated click-search graphs Stem cell research GM food Mobile phone radiation cartoons AND (denmark or danish)

Mozdeh – Blog analysis

Research blog analysis projectGives control over the data source

Detecting Debates in Blogs

Case study: Public science debates

How to detect a new debate?

Heuristic methods E.g. Read papers, scan relevant blogs

Automatic methods E.g. look for sudden increase in usage

of science-related words in blogs?

Free hot topic searches

Blog keyword search (sort by date) Technorati “Searches weblogs by keyword and for

links” Stem cell research

Blogdigger stem cell researchSpot graph spikes in broad topic search

Blogpulse

Hot topic searches Blogdex – [deceased] (hot topics) Bloglines – [an ex-service] (most popular links)

Searches find the really big science debates?

Specialist research tools

Commercial software Intelliseek/IBM

Mozdeh RSS monitor Generates sub-collections Generates word time series Allows keyword searches Identifies hot topics

Science concern corpus

A collection of postings containing a fear word AND a science word, matching the search: (science OR scientist OR research OR

researcher) AND (fear OR afraid OR worry)

Trend detection used to identify hot “science fear” topics- words with sudden increases in usageManual scanning of top words to identify genuine topics

Top science concern words

Word Max. daily increase (feeds)

Classification

stem 19% Science fear (stem cell research)

orlean 16% Information (about hurricane)

CISCO 14% Router security fears

Schiavo 12% Life support machines

7.5% of the top 200 terms were new relevant debates

Other tools: Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trendshttp://www.google.com/trends?hl=zh-cnhttp://www.google.com/trends/music

Conclusions

Many free tools support exploration of “Consumer Generated Media”Many opportunities for exploration and new types of social science research

Thelwall, M. (2007, to appear). Blog searching: The firstgeneral-purpose source of retrospective public opinion inthe social sciences? Online Information Review.