Jaideep Godara

Vizblog: Visualization Tool for Weblog Networks (2005-2006)

Organization: Digital Government Research Group, Virginia Tech
Duration: 8 months

Research paper published in The Proceedings of the 8th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference.

Another paper from this research about Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative tools is submitted to Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)- 2009.

Introduction:
Recent years have seen the emergence of weblogs as a means for people to share opinions and deliberate on common interests. The vast volume of blogs and lack of a comprehensive filtering tool, however, makes content exploration and locating discussions of interest relatively difficult and time-consuming.

We have designed a weblog visualization tool, VizBlog, to track, filter and analyze weblog networks and discussion topics. VizBlog scans a given aggregator weblog and creates a graphic network of discussions. It uses vector association and content analysis to represent and summarize weblogs and articles into nodes. These nodes are further linked to each other to form clusters of related local content.

Vizblog: Blog Network Visualization Tool

Color-coding to Show Linked Clusters

Users can navigate and explore online discussions by interacting with the graph, filtering content, and engaging into conversations. This graphic representation of online discussion is especially helpful in outlining popular topics of interest (or buzz in Blogosphere) and laying out the structure of conversations. A case study on regional Southwest Virginia blogs has provided evidence of the tool’s usability and capacity for facilitating knowledge sharing.

Salient features:

• Vizblog offers two built-in filter options based on internal/external links and similarity of keywords (low, medium and high) to identify weblogs and articles.
• Vizblog also offers customized filtering through keyword search. This option shows resulting graph from the keyword search for a given keyword. Only those blogs that have the keyword are displayed along with their linkages to other result blogs to present the network.
• Graph panning and zooming option are available for the global and local tracking of network by mouse movements. These functions allow for easier graph exploration.
• Preliminary usability studies have shown that filtering and search options are the most easy and intuitive functions. Learnability for these functions was also high.
• Users found the color-coding for search and linked views very helpful in identifying the discussions and blogs.
• The Similarity and zooming functions were, however, less satisfactory and needs improvement in future versions of the tool.

Built-in Filtering Options

Keyword Similarity Results