Blogosphere and Its Exploration

This book represents an attempt to fully review the phenomenon of the blogosphere. The intention is to provide a reliable guide to understanding and analyzing the world of the unimaginable number of diverse blogs, each consisting of innumerable posts, which in their entirety form the blogosphere. We go on to answer the questions of how to grasp the complexity of the blogosphere and extract useful knowledge from it. In setting out to write this book, our central aim was to increase the reader’s awareness and understanding of the blogosphere phenomenon, including its structure and characteristics. This can be achieved through a better understanding of individual blogs and their particular technical characteristics, as well as a deeper knowledge of how a single blog is embedded and interconnected within the entire blogosphere. The shape and form of the blogosphere can be described using the analogy of different continents. In our description the defining features and characteristics of the continents are illustrated by paradigmatic example blogs. Following on from the structural analysis we provide details of the available methods and describe the complex challenge of automatically retrieving information from the abundance of data contained in the blogosphere. Finally, we present our blog search platform, called BLOGINTELLIGENCE and describe all the tools and features we have developed during the last couple of years to explore the blogosphere.

Prof. Dr. sc. nat. Christoph Meinel (1954) is President and CEO of the Hasso-Plattner-Institut for IT-Systems Engineering (HPI) and full professor (C4) for computer science at the University of Potsdam. His research field is Internet and Web Technologies and Systems. Beside he is a teacher at the HPI School of Design Thinking, a visiting professor at the Computer Science School of the Technical University of Beijing (China) and a research fellow of the interdisciplinary center SnT at the University of Luxembourg. Since 2008 he is program director of the HPI–Stanford Design Thinking Research Program. He is author or co-author of 10 text books and monographs and has published more than 350 per-reviewed scientific papers in highly recognised international scientific journals and conferences.
Philipp Berger is a Ph.D. student at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute,Germany, investigating new algorithms for analyzing social media channels. Currently, his focus is the identification of important authors and topics among weblogs.His research results are part of a joint research project called BlogIntelligence that offers a web prototype portal (blog-intelligence.com). Philipp, born in Berlin, earned his Bachelor and Master degree in IT Systems Engineering at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute. During his studies he went abroad for an internship on product feature extraction of product Reviews at SAP Labs, India.
Dr. Justus Bross joined the research organization "Bell Labs" of Alcatel-Lucent as head of the newly formed research department "Strategic Industries Research". He published several papers in the research area of the collaborative- and social web in general, and weblogs in particular. His thesis also focuses on the “Understanding and Leveraging the Social Physics of the Blogosphere” and was mentored by Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel. Justus, born in 1979 in the city of Bonn (Germany), graduated from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands with a master degree (M.Sc.) in International Business, earned a master degree in engineering (MBE) from the Steinbeis academy and the D.E.L.E language diplomaat the University of Salamanca in Spain. He wrote his final thesis about the disruptive character of VoIP in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom AG.
Patrick Hennig, born in 1988 in the city of Walldürn, Germany, got a bachelors degree (B.Sc) in IT-Systems Engineering from Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam, Germany. He wrote his bachelor thesis in cooperation with SES Astra, Belgium and SAP Research Pretoria, South Africa about project management with SCRUM in small scale projects. After he received his bachelor’s degree he studied abroad at University of Coimbra, Portugal in Computer Engineering. Since his masters studies (M.Sc.) in IT-Systems Engineering and the master thesis about "Identifying Trends based on the Blogosphere" at Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam, Germany, he is focusing on the topic of social media monitoring especially by working on an analysis framework for blogs, integrated into a web portal (blog-intelligence.com), with the objective to leverage content- and context-related structures and dynamics in the blogosphere. Particularly he is working on the challenge to do real-time analyses on this big set of data. Currently, Patrick is a PhD student at Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam, Germany.