Abstract
Social media has grown to be the place for voicing one’s opinions, sharing information, and shaping discourse. Individuals use social media as a platform to mobilize, coordinate, and conduct cyber campaigns ranging from awareness for diseases or disorders to deviant acts threatening democratic principles and institutions. Blogosphere has continued to rise and afford an effective medium for content framing. With no restriction on the number of characters, many use blogs to set narratives then use other social media channels like Twitter and Facebook to steer their audience to their blogs. Also, due to the unlimited number of characters that can shared on blogs, they are a good source of influence and intelligent conversation as compared to twitter and other microblogging sites for hot topic. Influence can also be deduced properly from blog data unlike twitter and other microsite where influence may be false as character limitation usually leads to wrong narratives. Blog content is not structured and hard to collect than other social media channels. Blog monitoring and analysis could be of great use to sociologists, political scientists, communication researchers, journalists and information scientists to examine events. Toward this direction, we present Blogtrackers tool, which is designed to explore the blogosphere and gain insights on various events. Blogtrackers can help in identifying leading information actors, influential bloggers, popular and emerging trends, assess tones, sentiments and opinions, extract entities, analyze blog networks and narratives.Visit Publisher
