Blogosphere: Research Issues, Applications, and Tools

The objective of this tutorial is to give a comprehensive overview of the techniques, applications, and research issues in the blogosphere. Weblogs, or Blogs, have facilitated people to express their thoughts, voice their opinions, and share their experiences and ideas. Individuals experience a sense of community, a feeling of belonging, a bonding that members matter to one another and their niche needs will be met through online interactions. Its open standards and low barrier to publication have transformed information consumers to producers. This has created a plethora of open-source intelligence, or "collective wisdom" that acts as the storehouse of overwhelming amounts of knowledge about the members, their environment and the symbiosis between them. Nonetheless, vast amounts of this knowledge still remain to be discovered and exploited in its most suitable way. In this tutorial, we introduce current and state-of-the-art research issues, review some key elements of research such as tools and methodologies in Blogosphere, and present a case study of identifying the influential bloggers in a community to exemplify the integration of some major aspects discussed in this tutorial.