A Short Walk in the Blogistan (summary)

Blog has grown rapidly in the last two years as a new communication mechanism between afi cionados who appear to avidly follow the opinions, stories, and observations. Blogs in practice have turned out to be writings aobut a variety of topics, typically updated on a much more regular basis than homepages. Blogs are basically large queues with additions appearing at the top of the page and older material scrolling down. The key differences between ordinary Web pages and a blog is the constant updating of content as well as links to other sites that are themselves changing. This paper explore how emerging interests and patterns can be extrated by tracking a seed collection of blogs that have been modified fairly recently. They develop a methodology to identify emerging patterns on general data sets that comprise evolving communication networks. And examine the size and nature of the blogistan (describe the collection of blogs) based on a recent collection of blogs. They also present a collection of inferences and observations based on our study on identifying blogs, the growing spam problem in blogs, and how blog sites are accessed.