Those of you who have been at BlogTalk 2 in Vienna in 2004, have glimpsed some of the work Anjo Anjewierden (University of Amsterdam) has been doing on tracking communities, conversations and topics through blognetworks.
Original aim was to see if knowledge is indeed spread through these text-based virtual communities. You might e.g. expect that something that has been discussed should afterwards pop up in people’s writings where it didn’t before: propagation of ideas and insights. Anjo worked with a dataset of all 2004 postings of a group of blogs, but now is ready to expand.
On a study day of the METIS project yesterday, I was pleased to hear that turning the tools Anjo build into something that can be used by the community at large is now a planned deliverable.
Now it is up to us to feed Anjo’s dataset. For those that use Movable Type or can export in the same format, it has now become as easy as clicking the Export button to help feed Anjo’s tools.
Head on over to Anjo’s call to arms, read what he is looking for, and contribute if you can!
Rumours are flying that BlogTalk Reloaded may be a good point in time to present results.