BlogScope

About

BlogScope is an analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere which is being developed as part of a research prject at the the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto.

Motivation: The explosive growth of the internet and the massive adoption of social media has created new ways for individuals to express their opinions online. Millions of bloggers across the globe are writing daily to produce one of the richest pool of information, blogosphere. Bloggers blog about diverse topics including their personal lives, product reviews, political opinions, technology trends, tourism experiences, sports events, and the entertainment industry. Without a doubt, blogging is a social phenomenon. This trend will persist and grow as our lifes become more heavily dependent on internet technologies. Given such trends there is pressing need to monitor such online forums continuously, and extract useful and actionable information regarding the "public opinion" on a variety of topics. BlogScope tries to help user discover knowledge from blogs by providing hints in form of bursts and correlations.

We currently have over 28.61 million blogs with 405.12 million posts in our database. After removing non-english content and spam posts, we index 228.75 million documents. This data can be analyzed using BlogScope, as demonstrated by this flash video. For regular use of BlogScope, Firefox search plugin can be installed by clicking here.

Know more about the system, take a tour.

We love feedback. Please write to us online or send mail to admin@blogscope.net.

Members

Nilesh Bansal : PhD student : University of Toronto
Nick Koudas : Professor : University of Toronto
Michael Mathioudakis : PhD student : University of Toronto
Nikos Sarkas : PhD student : University of Toronto

Collaborators

Fei Chiang : PhD student : University of Toronto
Sudipto Guha : Professor : University of Pennsylvania
Frank Wm. Tompa : Professor : University of Waterloo
David Yin Yang : PhD student : Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Summer Interns

Hao-Yu Alexander Cheng : Undergraduate Student : University of Toronto
Trung Ha : Undergraduate Student : University of Toronto
Maksims Volkovs : Undergraduate Student : University of Toronto

Past Contributors

Amit Chandel : Alumni : University of Toronto

Publications

Nilesh Bansal, Sudipto Guha, Nick Koudas, Ad-Hoc Aggregations of Ranked Lists in the Presence of Hierarchies, to appear in Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2008, Vancouver, Canada, June 9-12 2008. (slides)

Nilesh Bansal, Fei Chiang, Nick Koudas, Frank Wm. Tompa, Seeking Stable Clusters in the Blogosphere, In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2007, Vienna, Austria, Sept 23-28 2007. (slides)

Nilesh Bansal, Nick Koudas, BlogScope: A System for Online Analysis of High Volume Text Streams, In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2007, Vienna, Austria, Sept 23-28 2007, Demonstration Proposal.

Nilesh Bansal, Nick Koudas, Searching the Blogosphere, In Proceedings of the 10th international Workshop on Web and Databases, WebDB 2007, (co-located with SIGMOD) Beijing, China, June 15 2007. (slides)

Nilesh Bansal, Nick Koudas, BlogScope: Spatio-temporal Analysis of the Blogosphere, In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2007, Banff, Canada, May 8-12, 2007, Poster.