International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Contact Information
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March 30-April 2, 2008

Pre-Conference Tutorials

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

1:30 - 3:30 PM, Tutorial 1: Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis

3:30 - 4:00 PM, Break

4:00 - 6:00 PM, Tutorial 2: Graph Mining Techniques for Social Media Analysis

Technical Program - Accepted Papers

Monday, March 31, 2008

8:45 AM - 9:00, Opening Remarks

9:00 - 10:00, Invited Speaker: Brad Fitzpatrick

10:00 - 10:30, Break

10:30 - 12:00 PM, Data Mining 1 (Chair: Lise Getoor)


  • Link-PLSA-LDA: A new unsupervised model for topics and influence of blogs, Ramesh Nallapati, William Cohen
  • Competing to Share Expertise: the Taskcn Knowledge Sharing Community,Jiang Yang, Lada Adamic, Mark Ackerman
  • Finding Influencers and Consumer Insights in the Blogosphere, Naohiro Matsumura, Hikaru Yamamoto, Daisuke Tomozawa

12:00 - 1:30, Lunch

1:30 - 3:30, Psychology (Chair: Ed Chi)


  • What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality? David Evans, Sam Gosling, Anthony Carroll (best paper nominee)
  • Spontaneous Inference of Personality Traits from Online Profiles, Kristin Stecher, Scott Counts
  • The Psychology of Word Use in Depression Forums in English and in Spanish, Nairan Ramírez-Esparza, Cindy Chung, Ewa Kacewicz, James W. Pennebaker
  • Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes, Kristin Stecher, Scott Counts

3:30 - 4:00, Break

4:00 - 5:30, Data Mining 2 (Chair: Lada Adamic)


  • Document Representation and Query Expansion Models for Blog Recommendation, Jaime Arguello, Jonathan Elsas, Jamie Callan, Jaime Carbonell (best paper nominee)
  • Polling the Blogosphere: a Rule-Based Approach to Belief Classification, Jason Kessler
  • International Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs, Mikhail Bautin, Lohit Vijayarenu, Steven Skiena

6:30PM - 10:00, Reception at the Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Garden


Tuesday, April 1, 2008

8:45 AM - 9:00, Opening Remarks

9:00 - 10:00, Invited Speaker: Marc Smith [Update]

10:00 - 10:30, Break

10:30 - 12:00 PM, Design and Analysis (Chair: Marti Hearst)


  • Wikipedian Self-Governance in Action: Motivating the Policy Lens, Ivan Beschastnikh, Travis Kriplean, David McDonald (best paper award)
  • A Large-Scale Study of MySpace: Observations and Implications for Online Social Networks, James Caverlee, Steve Webb
  • Space Planning for Online Community, Danyel Fisher, Tammara Turner, Marc Smith

12:00 - 1:15, Lunch

1:15 - 2:15, Invited Talk: David Sifry

2:15 - 2:45, Break

2:45 - 4:45, Data Mining 3 (Chair: Marc Smith)


  • Recovering Implicit Thread Structure in Newsgroup Style Conversations, Yi-Chia Wang, Mahesh Joshi, William Cohen, Carolyn Rosé
  • A Social Network Based Approach to Personalized Recommendation of Participatory Media Content, Aaditeshwar Seth, Jie Zhang
  • Wikipedia as an Ontology for Describing Documents, Zareen Syed, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi
  • On TREC Blog Track, Iadh Ounis, Craig Macdonald, Ian Soboroff

4:45 - 5:30, Poster Madness

6:30 PM - 8:30, Poster Reception at the Hilton


Wednesday, April 2, 2008

8:30 AM - 8:45, Opening Remarks

8:45 - 10:15, News/Media (Chair: TBA)


  • BLEWS: Using Blogs to Provide Context for News Articles, Michael Gamon, Sumit Basu, Dmitriy Belenko, Danyel Fisher, Matthew Hurst, Arnd Christian König
  • Exploring Social Media Scenarios for the Television, Noor Ali-Hasan
  • The Politics of Sourcing: A Study of Journalistic Practices in the Blogosphere, Gina Walejko, Thomas Ksiazek

10:15 - 10:45, Break

10:45 - 12:15, Panel, Politics and Social Media

12:15 - 12:30 PM, Closing Remarks


Panel

The news media and politics have a historical relationship that evolves with each new media channel. The Kennedy-Nixon debate is now seen as a watershed moment for television and politics; television's immediacy and visual messages provided a stark contrast to newspapers and was an evolutionary step from radio. Today, social media such as blogs and wikis differ dramatically from traditional media in their facilitation of interaction and dialog and in their ability to leverage what Chris Anderson has dubbed "the long tail" of the market. As we approach a pivotal presidential election, what is relationship between social media and politics today and where is it headed?
  • Kathy Gill (University of Washington)
  • Sumit Basu (Microsoft Research)
  • David Postman (Seattle Times)
  • Derek Young (Exit133)

Posters

  • Mining and Visualizing Online Web Content Using BAM: Brand Association Map, Navot Akiva, Eliyahu Greitzer, Yakir Krichman, Jonathan Schler
  • Computational Metaphor Identification in Communities of Blogs, Eric Baumer, Bill Tomlinson
  • Examining Privacy in Blogging from the Reader's Perspective, Eric Baumer, Mark Sueyoshi, Bill Tomlinson
  • ASL-STEM Forum: A Bottom-Up Approach to Enabling American Sign Language to Grow in STEM Fields, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Daniel S. Otero, Jessica N. DeWitt, Anna C. Cavender, and Richard E. Ladner
  • Understanding the Efficiency of Social Tagging Systems using Information Theory, Ed H. Chi, Todd Mytkowicz
  • Predicting Success and Failure in Weight Loss Blogs through Natural Language Use, Cindy K. Chung, Clinton Jones, Alexander Liu, James W. Pennebaker
  • Extracting Topics and Innovators Using Topic Diffusion Process in Weblogs, Tadanobu Furukawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Ikki Ohmukai, Koki Uchiyama, Mitsuru Ishizuka
  • Communicative Informatics: A Social Media Perspective for Online Communities, Linda Gallant, Gloria Boone
  • An Automatic Classification of Book Texts to User-Defined Tags, Sharon Givon, Theresa Wilson
  • StoryUpgrade: Finding Stories in Internet Weblogs, Andrew S. Gordon, Reid Swanson
  • iBlogVis: An Interactive Blog Visualization Tool, Indratmo, Julita Vassileva
  • Logsonomy: A Search Engine Folksonomy, Robert Jäschke, Beate Krause, Andreas Hotho, Gerd Stumme
  • Approximating the Community Structure of the Long Tail, Akshay Java, Anupam Joshi, Tim Finin
  • Preliminary Semantic Analysis of Political Blogs, Maojin Jiang, Shlomo Argamon
  • Second Space: A Generative Model for the Blogosphere, Amit Karandikar, Akshay Java, Anupam Joshi, Tim Finin, Yaacov Yesha, Yelena Yesha
  • Cross-Lingual Blog Analysis based on Multilingual Blog Distillation from Multilingual Wikipedia Entries, Mariko Kawaba, Hiroyuki Nakasaki, Takehito Utsuro, Tomohiro Fukuhara
  • Discovering Relationships among Tags and Geotags, Sang Su Lee, Dongwoo Won, Dennis McLeod
  • Some Users Pack a Wallop: Measuring the Impact of Core Users on the Participation of Others in Online Social Systems, Thomas M. Lento, Eric Gleave, Marc A. Smith, Howard T. Welser
  • The MultiRank Bootstrap Algorithm: Self-Supervised Political Blog Classification and Ranking Using Semi-Supervised Link Classification, Frank Lin, William W. Cohen
  • Blog Link Classification, Justin Martineau, Matthew Hurst
  • Analysis of Online Question-Answering Forums as Heterogeneous Networks, Tsuyoshi Murata, Tomoyuki Ikeya
  • Extraction of Topical Consumer Products from Weblogs, Shinichi Nagano, Masumi Inaba, Yumiko Mizoguchi, Takahiro Kawamura
  • Thematic and Social Indicators for Flickr Groups, Christophe Prieur, Nicolas Pissard, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Dominique Cardon, Pascal Pons
  • A Shallow Approach to Subjectivity Classification, Stephan Raaijmakers, Wessel Kraaij
  • Collecting and Analyzing Japanese Splogs based on Characteristics of Keywords, Yuuki Sato, Takehito Utsuro, Tomohiro Fukuhara, Yasuhide Kawada, Yoshiaki Murakami, Hiroshi Nakagawa, Noriko Kando
  • StYLiD: Structure Your Own Linked Data, Aman Shakya, Hideaki Takeda, Vilas Wuwongse
  • Clustering Tags in Enterprise and Web Folksonomies, Edwin Simpson
  • The Psychology of Blogging Communities: Social Identities and Knowledge Transfer across Work-Groups, Bryan Sippel, Susan E. Brodt
  • Recommendation of Multimedia Items by Link Analysis and Collaborative Filtering, Davin Wong, Ella Bingham, Saara Hyvöne

Demonstrations

  • GroupMe! - Combining Ideas of Wikis, Social Bookmarking, and Blogging, Fabian Abel, Mischa Frank, Nicola Henze, Daniel Krause, Patrick Siehndel
  • Visualization of Social Interactions in Facebook, Takashi Okamoto, Kyle Buza
  • Social Access Control for Social Media Using Shared Knowledge Questions, Michael Toomim, Xianhang Zhang, James Fogarty, Nathan Morris