Using hyperlinks to enrich message board content with linked data

Since social media sites have existed, a major element of the conversations which take place on them has been links to external websites. Users share videos or photos they have seen, point to products or movies they are interested in, and use external articles as a reference in discussions. As websites publish more structured and machine-readable data, notably in RDF, an increasing number of the links posted to social media sites do not just point to a webpage but are also associated with a structured data source. The integration of such external data can give us an enhanced insight into the conversation, both for analysing communities and for building applications. This approach can be applied to any online social space, but in this paper we present the use-case of enriching bulletin boards. We investigate the hyperlinks posted on a message board over a 10 year period and show how the external structured information related to these links has grown. We use data aggregated from several external sites providing RDF data or APIs to show how enriching forums with external data can provide us with enhanced insight into online conversation. We discuss potential applications of this approach, for message boards and for social media in general.