Modeling Malaysian Public Opinion by Monitoring the Malaysian

BlogosphereBrian Ulicny

VIStology, Inc.Framingham, MA

IBlogs GoalsCluster Posts by Event, and Rank using new metrics for • Relevance• Timeliness (& Locality)• Specificity• CredibilityApplied to Malaysian Blogosphere as a Case StudyAFOSR funded; Distributed Intelligence Program

– Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information

– Ends November, 2008.

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Commercial State of Art

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1. Technorati Blog Search 2. Organized by Date and

Authority.3. Authority = Global Link

Popularity.4. No way to filter blogs

by location currently.5. So must probe via

keywords.6. No aggregation of

topics or links locally.

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The Malaysian BlogosphereFormer British colony.

English 2nd Most Common Language.Complex ethnic and religious social structure.Press tightly controlled

RSF: 124th of 169.But: Internet growth encouraged.Over 150K Malaysian profiles on Blogger.com.

310K profiles on Facebook.comBlogs have exposed alleged government corruption

and organized protests.Government has intimidated and arrested bloggers.

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Malaysian SoPo Blogosphere

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Malaysia SoPo Blogs:385 blogs in crawl seed yields 220.3K urls, 4693 Sites

@ depth 4• ~2K Blogs

– 1,059 Blogspot Blogs, 801 Wordpress, 16 Typepad• 272 .org, 45 .gov.my • Of the Blogspot blogs (structured profiles)

– 659 Malaysia, 166 other, 234 unspecified• 122 Kuala Lumpur• 88 Selangor (State)• 31 Johor (State), 10 Subang Jaya, 11 Klang, 6 Johor Bahr

– 10 list Koran as favorite book; 4 Bible

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Fragmentation of References:Diversity of Links for Bersih Rally Posts

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Posting and Linking PatternsMalaysian SoPo Bloggers, Blogging Unfree Press

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Cf. 50% of US “A-list”Blog posts contain a news link(Adamic, Glance. 2005)

Clustering by Event:Nov. 10, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, police

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StarNST

CNN

BBC

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Blog Post RelevanceAboutness Determined by Term Frequency

in Post Text plus Linked Text

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IHT article Jeff Ooi PostLinks To

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Blog Post SpecificitySpecificity Determined by # Unique NPs

in Post Text and Linked Text

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IHT article (16 UNPs) Jeff Ooi Pos(26 UNPs)Links To11

Blog Post Timeliness & Locality:Timeliness is Difference between Post Time and

Dateline

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Published: November 11, 2007 Posted by Jeff Ooi on November 11, 2007 10:54 AMTimeliness = 0 days

Dateline: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Profile: MalaysiaLocality = 0 miles

Centrality vs. CredibilityBlog EDCGoldTruths

(7.8)Rocky’s Bru(14.8)

ForeverFriends(3.8)

Centrality .546 .472 .012Real* Name Ina Stanley Ahiruddin Attan (Orchid)

Provides Location Durham, NC Kuala Lumpur, MY Banjarmasin, ID

Provides Email No Yes No

Average Posts/Day 0.25 1.9 _

Linking Sites 44 38 1

Avg. Non-Spam Comments

1.2 35 0

Blogging for n Months

5 16 4

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Conclusions and Future Work

• 1. It is possible to geolocate many Malaysian bloggers explicitly, particularly Blogspot bloggers.

• 2. System can now extract (nearly all) the features we need automatically now.

• 3. Integration efforts ongoing to tie all the pieces together.

• 4. This will allow us to do a complete, fully automated analysis of important events in the Malaysian (sopo)blogosphere, such as the Bersih Rally example that was repeatedly used in the slides.

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Questions?

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Brian UlicnyVIStology, Inc.

bulicny@vistology.com

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IBlogs Architecture

BlogOntology

Event ontology

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BaseVISor and Ontology Reasoning

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Alias: Pak Lah?

Abdullah BadawiPak LahAbdullah Ahmad Badawi

Bersih Rally in Global Blogosphere:1432 Posts in Week 1

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Bersih Rally Posts

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Bersih Rally Hindraf Rally

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