TRIB : A Clustering and Visualization System for Responding Comments on Blogs

In recent years, Weblog has become the most typical social media for citizens to share their opinions. And, many Weblogs reflect several social issues. There are many internet users who actively express their opinions for internet news or Weblog articles through the replying comments on online community. Hence, we can easily find internet blogs including more than 10 thousand replying comments. It is hard to search and explore useful messages on weblogs since most of weblog systems show articles and their comments to the form of sequential list. In this paper, we propose a visualizing and clustering system called TRIB (Telescope for Responding comments for Internet Blog) for a large set of responding comments for a Weblog article. TRIB clusters and visualizes the replying comments considering their contents using pre-defined user dictionary. Also, TRIB provides various personalized views considering the interests of users. To show the usefulness of TRIB, we conducted some experiments, concerning the clustering and visualizing capabilities of TRIB, with articles that have more than 1,000 comments.