Social Physics of the Blogosphere

It was already shown on several occasions that it can be highly meaningful for individuals, institutions or even governments to find ways and measures in order to extract reliable and insightful trends, opinions or particular pieces of information out of the blogosphere. However, it is increasingly difficult if not impossible for the average internet user and sympathizer of weblogs to grasp the blogosphere's complexity as a whole, due to thousands of new weblogs and an almost uncountable number of new posts adding up to the before-mentioned collective on a daily basis. Mining, analyzing, modeling and presenting this vast pool of knowledge in one central framework to extract, exploit and represent meaningful knowledge for the common blog user forms the basis of this paper. The result of the corresponding long-term research initiative presented here is BLOGINTELLIGENCE. It is an integrated blog analysis framework with the objective to leverage content- and context-related structures and dynamics residing in the blogosphere and to make these findings available in an appropriate format to anyone interested. We hereafter refer to these structures and dynamics as social physics of the blogosphere.