1. Blog searching and Web 2.0 Technologies: New Insights into Customers/Citizens/Voters? Mike Thelwall Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group Web Impact Audits

2. Contents Background Blogs Online news sources RSS Tracking public science debates Detecting public science debates

3. Background Blogs, public opinion, online news, RSS

4. Background There are millions of bloggers Automatically tracking bloggers’ postings may give insights into public opinion

5. Blogs, MySpace etc… ‘A list’ blogs boing boingboing Political blogs Baghdad BurningBaghdad Burning Journalist blogs Tech BlogTech Blog Corporate blogs Official Google BlogOfficial Google Blog Semi-pro blogs blog to make moneyblog to make money Blogs of social sites like MySpace and LiveJournalMySpace LiveJournal

6. Blog tracking companies IBM WebFountain qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Web, intranet data, and other sources WebFountain Nielsen Buzzmetrics BlogPulse “Monitor, measure and leverage consumer- generated media” Market sentinel supplier of blog and web monitoring services identifies the sources that companies should monitor to take business decisions

7. RSS Format Rich Site Syndication/Really Simple Syndication XML technology Used for frequently updated information sources (blogs, news, academic journals) RSS Readers Users subscribe to the RSS feeds of favourite blogs/sites/journals/searches Notified when updates available User-controlled ‘push’ technology

8. Tracking Debates in Blogs Case study: Public science debates

9. Blog keyword searches Technorati “Searches weblogs by keyword and for links” Nokia Blogdigger stem cell research IceRocket Allows Advanced searchesAdvanced search Allows genuine date range search (Google only allows “last updated” date range searches)

10. Track evolution over time What is changing about interest in Stem cell research/GM food? Are experts good at identifying changes in public interest? How can experts be sure/can they be supported with quantitative information? Can blogs be used to generate time series reflecting changes in “public interest”?

11. Free science debate graphs Solves the trend identification problem? Blogpulse Offers free automatic blog searches and keyword-generated click- search graphs Stem cell research Stem cell GM food GM Mobile phone radiation cartoons AND (denmark or danish)

12. Mozdeh – Blog analysis Research blog analysis project Gives control over the data source

13. Detecting Debates in Blogs Case study: Public science debates

14. How to detect a new debate? Heuristic methods E.g. Read papers, scan relevant blogs Automatic methods E.g. look for sudden increase in usage of science-related words in blogs?

15. Free hot topic searches Blog keyword search (sort by date) Technorati “Searches weblogs by keyword and for links”  Stem cell research Stem cell research Blogdigger stem cell research stem cell research Spot graph spikes in broad topic search Blogpulse Hot topic searches Blogdex – [deceased] (hot topics) Bloglines – [an ex-service] (most popular links) Searches find the really big science debates?

16. Specialist research tools Commercial software Intelliseek/IBM Mozdeh RSS monitor Generates sub-collections Generates word time series Allows keyword searches Identifies hot topics

17. Science concern corpus A collection of postings containing a fear word AND a science word, matching the search: (science OR scientist OR research OR researcher) AND (fear OR afraid OR worry) Trend detection used to identify hot “science fear” topics- words with sudden increases in usage Manual scanning of top words to identify genuine topics

18. Top science concern words WordMax. daily increase (feeds) Classification stem19%Science fear (stem cell research) orlean16%Information (about hurricane) CISCO14%Router security fears Schiavo12%Life support machines 7.5% of the top 200 terms were new relevant debates

19. Other tools: Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends http://www.google.com/trends?hl=zh- cn http://www.google.com/trends/music

20. Conclusions Many free tools support exploration of “Consumer Generated Media” Many opportunities for exploration and new types of social science research Thelwall, M. (2007, to appear). Blog searching: The first general-purpose source of retrospective public opinion in the social sciences? Online Information Review.