This book represents an attempt to fully review the phenomenon of the blogosphere. The intention is to provide a reliable guide to understanding and analyzing the world of the unimaginable number of diverse blogs, each consisting of innumerable posts, which in their entirety form the blogosphere. We go on to answer the questions of how to grasp the complexity of the blogosphere and extract useful knowledge from it. In setting out to write this book, our central aim was to increase the reader¿s awareness and understanding of the blogosphere phenomenon, including its structure and characteristics. This can be achieved through a better understanding of individual blogs and their particular technical characteristics, as well as a deeper knowledge of how a single blog is embedded and interconnected within the entire blogosphere. The shape and form of the blogosphere can be described using the analogy of different continents. In our description the defining features and characteristics of the continents are illustrated by paradigmatic example blogs. Following on from the structural analysis we provide details of the available methods and describe the complex challenge of automatically retrieving information from the abundance of data contained in the blogosphere. Finally, we present our blog search platform, called BLOGINTELLIGENCE and describe all the tools and features we have developed during the last couple of years to explore the blogosphere.

Profound discussion of the blogosphere as example for social networks

Introduction.- The Blogosphere.- Understanding the Blogosphere.- Micro- and Macro-Perspective.- Areas of the Blogosphere.- Introduction to Important Areas of the Blogosphere.- Docu-Blog Use Case: The It-Gipfelblog.- Edu-Blog Use Case: InternetWorking Blog and HPI MOOCs.- Marketing-Blog Use Case: SAP HANA Blog.- Ego-Blog Use Case: Heinz-Paul Bonn.- Corporate-Blog Use Case: SAP Blog.- The Explorer's Path through the Blogosphere.- Challenge of Exploring the Blogosphere.- BlogIntelligence Portal.- DAta Extraction.- Data Analysis.- Data Visualization.- The Secret Depths of the Blogosphere.- Analyzing and Forecasting Trends.- Judging Consistency and Expertise of Blogs.- Expected Growth and Future Structure.- Future Influence and Usage Patterns.- Vision of Analysis and Monitoring.- Bibliography.