Grouping the Similar among the Disconnected Bloggers

Social interactions are an essential ingredient of our lives. People convene groups and share views, opinions, thoughts, and perspectives. Similar tendencies for social behavior are observed in the World Wide Web. This inspires us to study and understand social interactions evolving in online social media, especially in the blogosphere. In this chapter, the authors study and analyze various interaction patterns in community and individual blogs. This would lead to better understanding of the implicit ties between these blogs to foster collaboration, improve personalization, predictive modeling, and enable tracking and monitoring. Tapping interactions among bloggers via link analysis has its limitations due to the sparse nature of the links among the blogs and an exponentially large search space. The authors present two methodologies to observe interaction within the blogs via observed events addressing the challenges with link analysis-based approaches by studying the opinion and sentiments of the bloggers towards the events and the entities associated with the events. The authors present two case studies: (1) “Saddam Hussein’s Verdict” and (2) “The Death of Osama Bin Laden.” Through these case studies, they leverage their proposed models and report their findings and observations. Although the models offer promising opportunities, there are a few limitations. The authors discuss these challenges and envisage future directions to make the model more robust. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2806-9.ch004