International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

[joshua raclaw]

Even if you can't make it out to gorgeous Colorado, the conference is
providing a corpus of weblogs through their site that may be of interest to a
number of you.

CFP Below.


Joshua Raclaw - PhD student
Department of Linguistics
Culture, Language & Social Practice
University of Colorado at Boulder
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~raclaw/

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Recent years have seen a flourishing of social media - the promise of
the WWW coming to fruition. Across the world, individuals can share
opinions, experiences and expertise at the push of a button. There
has been a fundamental shift thanks to significant advances in the
ease of publishing content. Creating web content was for years the
domain of tech-savvy people; now the barrier has been torn down.

Perhaps the most visible among the successes of social media in
recent years is the blogosphere. Tens of thousands of new blogs are
created every day; blog content is becoming ubiquitous, surfacing in
news portals, search results and corporate public relations. Even
those who are unaware of the blogosphere are still influenced by its
content. Although blogs are highly visible currently, other forms of
conversational spaces continue to flourish, especially message
boards, mailing lists, review sites and Usenet.

Social media covers all forms of sharing: from photos, to videos, to
recommendations. In the past few years, many examples of social media
have become hugely successful. Flickr is a premier photo sharing
site; del.icio.us has become a touchstone for sharing recommendations
of websites; Web 2.0 applications in general abound with newcomers in
the social media space.

One of the fascinating aspects of social media has been the drive
from within to study the ecology as it evolves. People act at once as
creators, observers and influencers of the space in which they
participate. At the same time, businesses are quickly grasping the
potential benefit to attending to the new space of social media.
Monitoring the aggregate trends and opinions revealed by social media
provides valuable insight to a number of business applications:
marketing intelligence, competitive intelligence.

The fast growing blogosphere and social media space is a fruitful
area for investigations across many disciplines. For example:

     * Natural language processing and machine learning researchers
study the extraction of factual information from text; can blogs be
processed in a robust manner and can knowledge bases be populated
with facts from blogs?
     * Social network researchers and graph theory researchers are
concerned with inferring community structure; analyzing the linkage
patterns among blog entries can provide explicit community structure;
can we infer implicit communities through the content of the blogs?
     * Political scientists are looking at ways of identifying
influencers in a community; who are the influential bloggers whose
voice is echoed by others?
     * Multimedia researchers are attempting to categorize audio and
video content, aggregate information from diverse sources (textual,
audio, video); can visual & audio social media be stored in a way
that allows search across different modalities?
     * Market analysis researchers are concerned with what people
think of the products and services of a company; can we process blogs
automatically and find consumer complaints and breaking reports about
vulnerabilities of products; also when does a burst of blogging
activity become a trend?
     * Social psychologists study the response to current events,
including emotional and attitudinal dimensions as well as content and
patterns of influence.

Despite the growing relevance of blogs and social media, existing
research has only begun to address the spectrum of issues that arise
in their analysis. Blogs, for example, are a different kind of
document than the relatively clean text that NLP research is based
on. Such differences in term of structure, content and grammaticality
will be a challenge considering that blogs will likely represent the
most common way of publicly accessible personal expression.

Areas of interest
The conference aims to bring together researchers from different
subject areas (e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology,
statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies) and
foster discussions about ongoing research in the following areas:
[01] 	AI methods for ethnographic analysis through social media.
[02]	Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on
the media.
[03]	Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of
blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs.
[04]	Crawling/spidering and indexing.
[05] 	Human Computer Interaction; social media tools; navigation.
[06]	Multimedia; audio/visual processing; aggregating information
from different modalities.
[07] 	Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media name tracking;
named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.
[08]	Semantic Web; unstructured knowledge management.
[09]	Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction.
[10]	Social Network Analysis; communities identification; expertise
discovery; collaborative filtering.
[11]	Text categorization; gender/age identification; spam filtering.
[12] 	Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena
based on social media.
[13]	Trend identification/tracking.
[14]	Visualization, aggregation and filtering.
[15]	New social media applications, interfaces, interaction techniques.

Important dates
Submissions:	December 8, 2006
Acceptance Notifications:	February 2, 2007
Camera Ready Copies:	February 16, 2007
Tutorials:	March 25, 2007
Conference:	March 26-28, 2007

Submission
People interested in participating should submit through the
conference website a technical paper (up to 8 pages), a short paper
(up to 4 pages), a poster or demo description (up to 2 pages) by
midnight (PST) of Dec 8, 2006. Each submission should, to the extent
possible, indicate a list of relevant areas from the list above
(e.g., 03, 04, 10).

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