The Geolocation of Web Logs from Textual Clues

Understanding the spatial distribution of people who author social media content is of growing interest for researchers and commerce. Blogging platforms depend on authors reporting their own location. However, not all authors report or reveal their location on their blog´s home page. Automated geolocation strategies using IP address and domain name are not adequate for determining an author´s location because most blogs are not self-hosted. In this paper we describe a method that uses the place name mentions in a blog to determine an author´s location. We achieved an accuracy of 63% on a collection of 844 blogs with known locations.