A social network analysis and mining methodology for the monitoring of specific domains in the blogosphere

Whenever the question arises of how a product, a personality, a technology or some other specific entity is perceived by the public, the blogosphere is a very good source of information. This is what usually interests business users from marketing or PR. Modern search services offer a rich set of tools to monitor or track the blogosphere as a whole, but the analysis with respect to a certain domain is very limited. In this paper, we lay some foundations to aggregate blog articles of a specific domain from multiple search services, to analyze the social authorities of articles and blogs, and to monitor the attention articles of the domain receive over time. These are the building blocks required for a monitoring application that presents users the topics and trends in a specific domain along with the currently most interesting articles. This methodology has been instantiated and combined with additional textual analysis methods to create highly automated business intelligence application in the context of the Social Media Miner project.