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Metrics for Monitoring a Social-Political Blogosphere

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Metrics for Monitoring a Social-Political Blogosphere Metrics for Monitoring a Social-Political Blogosphere A Malaysian Case Study The authors’ automated framework evaluates blog posts in a social-political blogosphere and, by aggregation, entire blogs, according to their relevance, specificity, timeliness, and credibility. These metrics are superior to current methods in information retrieval for blogs because they better reflect the Social Computing in the Blogosphere distinctive hyperlink structure of a social-political blogosphere than do other methods. The authors chose the Malaysian social-political blogosphere as a case study because of the role Malaysian bloggers played leading up to that country’s 2008 general election, and afterward. Brian Ulicny he value of any piece of informa- up to that country’s 2008 general elec- and Christopher J. Matheus tion depends on its relevance, tion, and afterward. VIStology T specificity, timeliness, and cred- We developed four independent ibility to the task at hand. In recent metrics. To determine the credibility of Mieczyslaw M. Kokar years, local social-political (sopo) a blog author’s posts, we use author- Northeastern University blogospheres have become an important ity (centrality), engagement (user arena for political mobilization, but comments), and various credibility- qualitatively for an analyst or interested enhancing features that we’ve vali- observer, it’s difficult to evaluate infor- dated as informing human credibility mation in an unfamiliar blogosphere. judgments, such as blogging under a Here, we present novel metrics for real name, listing affiliations, and monitoring an unfamiliar blogosphere blogging over a long time period. We and demonstrate their superiority over determine a blog post’s relevance, or current metrics. We’ve implemented an what it’s about, not only by its text automated framework for evaluating but also by the text of any news arti- information in sopo blogospheres in a cle it references. Timeliness, as dis- way that better reflects their structure. tinguished from recency, is about We chose the Malaysian sopo blogo- proximity to a relevant event. We sphere as a case study because of the determine a blog post’s timeliness by role Malaysian bloggers played leading comparing its time stamp with the 30 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING Metrics for Monitoring a Social-Political Blogosphere Related Work in Monitoring International Blogs publication date of a news article that it cites. lthough blogging has drawn considerable attention from both Finally, the number of unique proper nouns A computer and political scientists considerably less research has mentioned in both a blog post and any news occurred on monitoring non-US political blogs (one exception is avail- article it cites determines its specificity. able elsewhere1). Marti Hearst, Matthew Hurst, and Susan Dumais note that it’s difficult to “take the pulse of the populace” on a given The Malaysian Sopo Blogosphere topic and to identify which blogs are worth reading on that topic.2 The Malaysian blogosphere provides an inter- The project we discuss in the main text tries to address these issues. esting set of properties for analysis. Although Rebecca Goolsby has detailed several “illusions” and “delusions” to be the Malaysian press is tightly controlled, the avoided in analyzing foreign blogs for intelligence.3 Researchers at Har- government has officially encouraged Internet- vard’s Internet & Democracy project present a clustering algorithm to based enterprises and rejected Web censorship discover affinities among Persian- language blogs based on the URLs to or filtering. (Article 3 of the 1998 Malaysian which they link, revealing interesting substructures.4 Finally, research- Communications and Multimedia Act states ers on IBM’s Banter project present a sophisticated model of political that “Nothing in this Act shall be construed blog topics.5 as permitting the censorship of the Internet.”1) Consequently, the Malaysian blogosphere has References become an important locus for political opposi- 1. H.W. Park and M. Thelwall, “Developing Network Indicators for Ideological Land- tion activity. scapes from the Political Blogosphere in South Korea,” J. Computer-Mediated Commu- Since 2007, however, the Malaysian govern- nication, vol. 13, no. 4, 2007, pp. 856–879. ment has attempted to intimidate opposition 2. M.A. Hearst, M. Hurst, and S.T. Dumais, “What Should Blog Search Look Like?” Proc. bloggers via lawsuits, police interrogations, and 2008 ACM Workshop on Search in Social Media, I. Soboroff et al., eds., ACM Press, arrests.2 In August 2008, the Malaysian gov- 2008, pp. 95–98; http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1458583.1458599. ernment blocked access to the online opposition 3. R. Goolsby, “The DoD Encounters the Blogosphere,” 1st Int’l Conf. Social Comput- news source Malaysia Today, and its publisher ing, Behavioral Modeling and Prediction, presentation slides, 2008; www.public.asu. was jailed under the Internal Security Act.3 edu/~huanliu/sbp08/Presentations/Invited/02_Goolsby_Blogosphere%20Phoenix.ppt. Nevertheless, on 10 November 2007, tens 4. J. Kelly and B. Etling, Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian of thousands of Malaysians potentially risked Blogosphere, research publication no. 2008-01, Berkman Center for Internet & Soci- prison sentences to participate in a rally for ety Publication Series, 2008. electoral reform in Kuala Lumpur (known as 5. W. Gryc et al., “Mining Political Blog Networks,” Harvard Networks in Political Sci- the Bersih rally), the first mass rally there in a ence Conf., presentation slides, 2008; www.hks.harvard.edu/netgov/files/NIPS/gryc decade. In the 2008 general election, the ruling party and coalition ultimately lost the super- majority they’d enjoyed since 1969 that had enabled them to modify the country’s constitu- URL’s text, followed by the text of each page tion at will. The Bersih rally couldn’t have been hyperlinked from that text, and so on for two mobilized without the Internet, aided, perhaps, further iterations. This crawl produced 220,320 by technologies such as SMS. Several bloggers unique URLs representing 4,693 unique sites. Of went on to win seats in parliament. these, approximately 2,000 were blogs, includ- Blogger.com, the most popular blogging ing 1,060 on Blogger, 801 on Wordpress, 16 on platform in Malaysia, has more than 152,000 Typepad, and the remainder either self-hosted Malaysian profiles — many more than on Word- or on other blogging services, such as Xanga, press.com or similar services. The number of Vox, or LiveJournal. A later crawl at the same people using social networking sites, however, depth of 1,271 blog posts mentioning “Ber- dwarfs the number of bloggers. As of August sih” in the week following the rally revealed 2008, 5.4 million Malaysians had profiles on 878 unique blogs, with 408 on Blogger, 228 on Friendster, 500,000 were on Facebook, and Wordpress, and the rest on other services. 293,000 were on MySpace. Figure 1 shows the Malaysian sopo blogo- To determine the size of the Malaysian sopo sphere’s link structure based on our original blogosphere, we performed a Web crawl seeded crawl. Unlike Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance’s with the 385 blogs in the Sopo-Sentral directory depiction of the US political blogosphere, little — a self-reported directory of Malaysian sopo evidence exists of polarization in the Malay- blogs (see http://sopo-sentral.blogspot.com) — sian structure.4 at a depth of four (that is, we processed each The Malaysian sopo blogs in our corpus are MARCH/APRIL 2010 31 Social Computing in the Blogosphere (a) Malaysian Sopo blogosphere (b) US political blogosphere (Adamic & Glance, 2005) Figure 1. Link structures in the blogosphere. We compare the (a) Malaysian social-political and (b) US blogospheres and see little evidence of polarization in the Malaysian structure. Table 1. Profile information disclosed pages. (We haven’t tried to deal with the small in social-political vs. random Malaysian blogs. amount of Chinese blog content in our data.) Malaysian sopo Random Malaysian The analysis we describe does include both bloggers (N = 700) bloggers (N = 112) Malaysian English and Bahasa Melayu (Malay- Student (%) 5.9 26.7 sian) content. By mining automatically identified profile Gender (%) 26.5 female 57.1 female pages for each blog (see Table 1), we see that the 48.4 male 25.9 male Malaysian sopo bloggers were older, on average, 25 unspecified 17 unspecified than a random sample of Malaysian bloggers. Plausible real name 35 26.8 Gender distribution was essentially reversed: Age 31.9 (average) 20.5 (average) sopo bloggers were about twice as likely to be 51.5% specify 66.9% specify male as female; the reverse is true for random Malaysian bloggers. Sopo bloggers were more Email address (%) 48.7 37.5 likely to provide an email address, but random Profile picture (%) 39.1 71.4 bloggers were more likely to provide a profile picture. Sopo bloggers were somewhat more Institutional affiliation (%) 19.1 6.3 likely to blog under a plausible real name and Political party (%) 27.9% specify 5% specify provide an affiliation than random bloggers, 10.2 UMNO and sopo bloggers were more likely to men- 7.1 PAS tion a political party in their profile; their dis- 4.2 PKR tribution follows the distribution of political 2.5 DAP affiliations in Malaysia generally. Finally, sopo 1.2 PSM bloggers were much less likely to be students. Average inbound links 53.7 2.5 The remaining rows show that the average sopo Average inbound blogs 23.6 1.8 blogger has more in-links and comments than Average total comments 43.1 3.5 random Malaysian bloggers. Average comments per 3.5 1.3 commented blog post Blogs and Blog Metrics Contemporary information retrieval approaches Average PageRank 2.8 1.2 model a Web page in two ways.
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