A clustering and opinion mining approach to socio-political analysis of the blogosphere

Abstract

Blogosphere is the name associated to universe of all the blog sites. A blog is a website that allows people to write about topics they want to share with others. The ease & simplicity of creating blog posts and their free form and unedited nature have made blogging a happening thing. The blogosphere today contains a large number of posts on virtually every topic of interest. This rich and unique source of data has attracted people and companies across disciplines to exploit it for varied purposes. However, it not only provides a rich data source for commercial exploitation but also for psychological & socio-political analysis purposes. This paper tries to identify the methodology and technical framework required for an analytical experiment of this kind, and demonstrates the plausibility of this idea through our clustering & opinion mining experiment on analysis of blog posts about a recent socio-political issue. © 2010 IEEE.