Monitoring the evolution of interests in the blogosphere

We describe blogTrust, an innovative modular and extensible prototype application for monitoring changes in the interests of blogosphere participants. We also propose a new approach for the analysis of weblog contents that is supported by blogTrust and can yield new insights on the analysis of the blogosphere by monitoring the convergence or dispersion of blogosphere interests. The proposed process classifies weblog posts in predefined categories, generates a feature vector for each weblog from the post classification results, clusters together blogs with similar topics/interests, and, via visualization techniques, enables the detection of interest convergence or divergence among bloggers over different time periods. BlogTrust uses established, robust data mining techniques to support every step of the process. The motivation for the work is a hypothesized strong connection between important (global or "local") events and the rapid reduction in the divergence of (global or "local") weblog topic coverage. We use preliminary experiments on a real data set as our running example. These preliminary experimental results provide support for our hypothesis, indicate the most critical points in the proposed process, and point to interesting directions for further research.