Mining the Blogosphere from a socio-political perspective

Blogs are websites that allow one or more individuals to write about things they want to share with others. The universe of all blog sites is referred to as Blogosphere. The ease & simplicity of creating blog posts and their free form and unedited nature have made the blogosphere a rich and unique source of data, which has attracted people and companies across disciplines to exploit it for varied purposes. The valuable data contained in posts from a large number of users across geographic, demographic and cultural boundaries provide a rich data source not only for commercial exploitation but also for psychological & socio-political research. This paper tries to demonstrate the plausibility of the idea through our clustering and opinion mining experiment on analysis of blog posts on recent socio-political developments in the new democratic republic of Nepal; and to elaborate the broader technical framework & tools required for this kind of analysis.