CINETGraphCrawl - Constructing graphs from blogs

Abstract

Internet forums, weblogs, social networks, and photo and video sharing websites are some forms of social media that are at the forefront of enabling communication among individuals. The rich information captured in social media has enabled a variety behavioral research assisting domains such as marketing, finance, public health and governance etc. Furthermore, social media is believed to be capable of providing valuable insights into understanding information diffusion phenomena such as social influence, opinion formation and rumor spread. Here, we propose a semi-automated approach with prototype implementation that constructs interaction graphs to enable such behavioral studies. We construct first and second degree interaction graphs from Stackoverflow, a programming forum, and CNN Political Ticker, a political news blog.