Discovering Web Communities in the Blogspace

With the emergence of a range of second generation Internet based services such as Weblogs and their hosting services, many loosely organized communities of bloggers have started to form around common interests. Those communities have quickly evolved into a new information and knowledge dissemination channel. Most current search engines cannot discover Weblog communities through regular keyword search. In this paper we propose a new way of collecting and preparing information for Weblog community discovery. Weblog community is treated as a social network and the data collection stage focuses on gaining knowledge of the strength of social ties between Web logs. The strength of social ties and the clustering feature of social network are used to extract communities from a large blogspace. We also develop a few metrics to rank communities as well as individual members in the community. We report several experimental results on "Web services" communities