Master Tese over Blogosphere Mining
Author: Santos, Henrique Dias Pereira dos
Advisor: Wives, Leandro Krug
Abstract: With the intesification of users accessing the Internet in Brazil, the amount of content produced by Brazilians increases. Thus, it becomes important to classify the best authors to have more confidence in the texts read. In this sense, this work presents a study on subject of topic authorities discovery in the Brazilian blogosphere. The scope of the study is the Blogspot platform, focusing on bloggers who identify themselves as Brazilians. To this end, we collected nine millions posts in the year of 2012 and considered the comments as a source of relationship between bloggers to generate a social network. This network was used for performing experiments considering the proposed approach to identify topic authorities. The algorithm used is based on the Topic PageRank, which can separate the different blogosphere’s topics by tags that users use on their posts, and then building the list of authorities on such topics. The experiments conducted show that the proposed approach results in better ranking than the original PageRank algorithm. We also characterize the collected database with a survey of over four thousand authors.