Geolocating Bloggers

TechCrunch posts an update on Outside.In, a service which brings a local twist to the blogosphere by associating blogs and posts with specific locations. This is a topic very close to my heart - I will be presenting a paper at ICWSM on geolocating bloggers. Outside.In uses user provided information to associate location with content - the information is provided specifically for the service.

We took a different approach - scraping profiles for user provided location information. By doing this, we created a reasonably large (and still growing) database of locations associated with bloggers (and, in fact, other social media authors).

We then started looking at an even more interesting problem: automatically classifying the location of an author based on their content. As far as we could determine, there is no real work published on this problem currently out there. Matthew Siegler, who did much of the work on this problem, found the initial results very encouraging. However, what started as a simple exploration of residence classification revealed itself to be a problem intersecting language, location, nationality and ethnicity at least!

Outside.In is not the first service to offer some form of local blog search. BlogDigger started a service based on meta geo information over a year ago.

Comments

[Greg Gershman]

Thanks for mentioning Blogdigger; our approach to geolocating blogs sounds similar to your approach, a combination of explicitly and implicitly declared metadata. The only other service I am aware of that has attempted an advanced approach by analyzing content is Topix.net, but I think it's rather straightforward, from what I can tell (my information comes only from looking at their site); articles mentioning locales are associated with that location.

[thinkbanc]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts in that last post. You have a talent for making a hard subject clear to others. I enjoy reading the posts from a guy who has the same flair for explaining things.

[manifest wealth]

That was a really knowledgeable post. I often find that this topic is complicated to get your head round but you have summed it up really well. You reminded me of a guy I was reading the other day who was really good too.

[bildekor]

Quite nicely written actually, i like it. :)