The development of a resilient weblog ranking metric within the global blogosphere, capable of identifying the most important or influential weblogs around, forms the central aspect of this paper. Because well-established ranking algorithms for traditional web pages are not perfectly applicable to the deviant linking characteristics of the blogosphere, blog engines, such as TECHNORATI, BLOG-PULSE or POSTRANK have developed their own tailor-made ranking metric. This paper will analyze and compare the ranking criteria of these service providers and reveal their conceptional shortcomings and discuss their strengths.
The massive adoption of social media has provided new ways for individuals to express their opinions online. The blogosphere, an inherent part of this trend, contains a vast array of information about a variety of topics. It is thus a huge think tank that creates an enormous and ever-changing archive of open source intelligence. Modeling and mining this vast pool of data to extract, exploit and describe meaningful knowledge in order to leverage (content-related) structures and dynamics of emerging networks within the blogosphere is the higher-level aim of the research presented here. This paper focuses on this project's initial phase, in which the abovementioned data of interest needs to be collected and made available offline for further analyses. Our proprietary development of a tailor-made feed-crawler meets exactly this need. The main concept, the techniques and the implementation details of the crawler thus form the main interest of this paper and furthermore provide the basis for future project phases.
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