Introduction
The weblogging community continues to evolve: weblogs are gaining more and more exposure, the number of bloggers continues to grow and the contribution of individual bloggers is becoming significant and compelling. The dynamics of the blogosphere, found in trackbacks, citation links, blog-rolls, comments, tags, shared topics and interests provides a facinating domain of study for researchers from all academic and commercial fields including text mining, social network analysis, computational linguistics, business and marketing intelligence, libarary sciences, taxonometrics, graph theory and data visualization.
In addition to a regular track of research presentations, this year's workshop will feature the first ever weblog research data release. This data release will allow researchers access to 10 million weblog posts from July 2005. Researchers are encouraged to use this data set in the presentation of their research results at the workshop. We plan to compile the papers that focus on this data set into a book which will present an exciting view of a specific period of blogosphere history.
The workshop will build on the success of the previous two meetings, bringing together researchers from these diverse areas, working in both academic and commercial settings: contributors with a keen interest in an area with increasing technological, social, political and cultural impact.
The workshop will be held in conjuction with WWW-2006, the 15th Annual International World Wide Web conference.
Areas of Interest
The weblogging phenomenon represents an exciting opportunity for many fields of research. Papers submitted to this workshop should be focus on one or more of the following topics:
- Mapping and visualization of the blogsphere
- Weblog taxonomies: automatic and/or manual construction, automatic classification of weblog entries
- Weblog tools: search, collaborative filtering
- Text mining: topic detection, phrase mining, sentiment analysis, gender/age/demographic identification, spam filtering, topic trending/tracking, tag analysis
- Time series forecasting: predicting future trends based on blog content
- Social network analysis: influential bloggers, ranking, authority, centrality, community identification
- Representations and markup: RSS, XML, microformats, structured blogging
- Dynamics of information flow across the blogsphere
- Sociological analyses: methods for weblog census, weblog lifecycle
- Influence of the blogosphere on the information landscape
- Aggregate measures over the blogosphere
- Document analysis for weblogs
- Alternative blog forms (podcasting, moblogging, photoblogs, etc.)
Data Challange
Much of the interest in research relating to weblogs involves the analysis of large quantities of data. As part of this workshop, we are very excited to provide a data set to the research community. The aim is to encourage the use of this data to focus the various views and analyses of the blogosphere over a common space. This will provide a unique opportunity to compare different views of the blogosphere and to stimulate interesting discussion and collaboration. As a result of this exercise, we plan to publish a book containing the collected data challange papers.
The data release comprises a complete set of weblog posts for three weeks in July 2005 (on the order of 10M posts from 1M weblogs). This data set has been selected as it spans a period of time during which an event of global significance occurred, namely the London bombings.
The data set includes the full content of the posts plus mark-up. The marked-up fields include: date of posting, time of posting, author name, title of the post, weblog url, permalink, tags/categories, and outlinks classified by type - details may be found here.
Intelliseek, Inc. will facilitate the distribution of the data. To obtain a copy of the data, sign and fax the datashare individual agreement form to Intelliseek.
Paper Submission and Review
Papers should be submitted via email to the workshop co-chairs at
Papers submitted to the workshop will undergo a peer review process overseen by the workshop co-chairs. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two program commitee members. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop by one of the authors and will be published in the WWW-2006 Workshops CD-ROM and online.
Papers should not exceed 5000 words (approximately 12 pages) in length and must be submitted in PDF. Short papers (up to 6 pages) describing early research results are also welcome.
Previous Workshops