Blogging becomes a popular way for a Web user to publish information on the Web. Bloggers write blog posts, share their likes and dislikes, voice their opinions, provide suggestions, report news, and form groups in Blogosphere. Bloggers form their virtual communities of similar interests. Activities happened in Blogosphere affect the external world. One way to understand the development on Blogosphere is to find influential blog sites. There are many non-influential blog sites which form the “the long tail”. Regardless of a blog site being influential or not, there are influential bloggers. Inspired by the high impact of the influentials in a physical community, we study a novel problem of identifying influential bloggers at a blog site. Active bloggers are not necessarily influential. Influential bloggers can impact fellow bloggers in various ways. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of identifying influential bloggers, investigate what constitutes influential bloggers, present a preliminary model attempting to quantify an influential blogger, and pave the way for building a robust model that allows for finding various types of the influentials. To illustrate these issues, we conduct experiments with data from a real-world blog site, evaluate multi-facets of the problem of identifying influential bloggers, and discuss unique challenges. We conclude with interesting findings and future work.

The attention economy motivates participation in peerproduced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement. Author Keywords Blogging, blog readers, attention economy, workplace,

Weblogs, or Blogs, have facilitated people to express their thoughts, voice their opinions, and share their experiences and ideas. Individuals experience a sense of community, a feeling of belonging, a bonding that members matter to one another and their niche needs will be met through online interactions. Its open standards and low barrier to publication have transformed information consumers to producers. This has created a plethora of open-source intelligence, or “collective wisdom ” that acts as the storehouse of overwhelming amounts of knowledge about the members, their environment and the symbiosis between them. Nonetheless, vast amounts of this knowledge still remain to be discovered and exploited in its suitable way. In this paper, we introduce various state-of-the-art research issues, review some key elements of research such as tools and methodologies in Blogosphere, and present a case study of identifying the influential bloggers in a community to exemplify the integration of some major aspects discussed in this paper. Towards the end, we also compare and contrast the blogosphere and social networks and the research therein. 1. INTRODUCTION TO

The automatic summarisation of sports video is of growing importance with the increased availability of on-demand content. Consumers who are unable to view events live often have a desire to watch a summary which allows then to quickly come to terms with all that has happened during a sporting event. Sports forums show that it is not only summaries that are desirable but also the opportunity to share one’s own point of view and discuss the opinions with a community of similar users. In this paper we give an overview of the ways in which annotations have been used to augment existing visual media. We present SportsAnno, a system developed to summarise World Cup 2006 matches and provide a means for open discussion of events within these matches. 1.

Web pages can be modeled as nodes in a social network, and hyperlinks between pages form links (relationships) between the nodes. Links may take the form of comments, for example on blogs, creating explicit connections between authors and readers. In this paper, we describe a novel methodology and framework for identifying subcommunities as cohesive subgroups of n-cliques and k-plexes within social hypertext. We apply our methodology to a group of computer technologists in Toronto called TorCamp who communicate using a Google group. K-plex analysis is then used to identify a group of people that forms a subcommunity within the larger community. The results are then validated against the experienced sense of community of people inside and outside the subcommunity. Statistically significant differences in experienced sense of community are found, with people within the subcommunity showing higher levels of perceived influence and emotional connection.

Abstract—Community detection has been one of the major topics in complex network research. Recently, several greedy algorithms for networks of millions of nodes have been proposed, but one of their limitations is inconsistency of outcomes [1]. Kwak et al. propose an iterative reinforcing approach to eliminate inconsistency in detected communities. In this paper we delve into structural characteristics of communities identified by Kwak’s method with 12 real networks. We find that about 40 % of nodes are grouped into communities in an inconsistent way in Orkut and Cyworld. Interestingly, they are only two out of 12 networks whose community size distribution follow power-law. As a first step towards interpretation of communities, we use Guimera and Amaral’s method [2] to classify nodes into seven classes based on the z-score and the participation coefficient. Using the z-P analysis, we identify the roles of nodes in Karate and Autonomous System (AS) networks and match them against known roles for evaluation. We apply topological mesoscale information to compare two AS produced by Oliveira et al. [3], and Dhamdhere and Dovrolis [4] We report that even though their AS graphs differ in size, their topological characteristics are very similar. I.

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Browsing a blog archive is currently not well supported. Users cannot gain an overview of a blog easily, nor do they receive adequate support for finding potentially interesting entries in the blog. To overcome these problems, we developed a visualization tool that offers a new way to browse a blog archive. The main design principles of the tool are twofold. First, a blog should provide a rich overview to help users reason about the blog at a glance. Second, a blog should utilize social interaction history preserved in the archive to ease exploration and navigation. The tool was evaluated using a tool-specific questionnaire and the Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction. Responses from the participants confirmed the utility of the design principles: the user satisfaction was high, supported by a low error rate of the given tasks. Qualitative feedback revealed that the decision to select which entry to read was multidimensional, involving factors such as the topic, the posting time, the length, and the number of comments on an entry. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of navigational support for blogs, in particular to facilitate exploratory tasks.

Abstract. Online communities thrive on their members ’ participation and contributions. There are numerous ways to visually represent information, current status, power, and acceptance of members in an online community. In this paper we present a design of a visualization representing reciprocal and non-reciprocal relationships among users, which emphasizes and hopefully triggers common bond in the community. Our future goal is to see whether the visualization triggers higher participation in an online community called “WISEtales”, which currently is mostly based on common identity. If our hypothesis is confirmed, it will present one of the few examples of successful community whose members associate both by common identity and common bond.

A network representation based on a basic wordoverlap similarity measure between blogs is introduced. The simplicity of the representation renders it computationally tractable, transparent and insensitive to representation-dependent artifacts. Using Swedish blog data, we demonstrate that the representation, in spite of its simplicity, manages to capture important structural properties of the content in the blogosphere. First, blogs that treat similar subjects are organized in distinct network clusters. Second, the network is hierarchically organized as clusters in turn form higher-order clusters: a compound structure reminiscent of a blog taxonomy. 1