Discovering Weblog Communities: A Content- and Topology-Based Approach

Jeroen Bulters and Maarten de Rijke

Weblogs have become a leading form of self-publication on the web. Personal weblogs are often considered to represent a person, and the links between webogs can naturally be given a social interaction. Against this background, finding a community around a given weblog--i.e., identifying a set of weblogs that forms a natural group together with the starting point, because of content or social reasons--is a very natural task. Traditional methods for community finding methods focus almost exclusively on topology analysis. In this paper we present a novel method for discovering weblog communities that incorporates both topology analysis and content analysis. We evaluate our method in a small-scale user study, analyze the contributions of the various components of our approach, and compare it against a state-of-the-art topologybased community finding algorithm.

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