Guest Editors´ Introduction: Social Computing in the Blogosphere

The widespread phenomenon of blogging demonstrates the power of citizen journalism and anytime information sharing. People can exchange personal experiences, voice opinions, offer suggestions, and form groups with genuine social activities. Blogs also act as conduits, propagating data at an unprecedented pace that has led to a gigantic and dynamic open source data archive as well as a unique opportunity for various research activities studying influence, trust, reputation, privacy, search, spam, and group interaction. An important challenge lies in modeling and mining this vast pool of data. Social computing is an emerging interdisciplinary field and offers unique opportunities for developing novel algorithms and tools, such as text and content mining, and graph and link mining. An associated challenge is data collection and objective evaluation: How can we effectively collect data and share it for research and benchmark building? The blogosphere´s distinctive nature offers an unprecedented platform for academics, researchers, and industrial practitioners of disparate disciplines to explore and collaborate. The blogosphere offers new challenges that require collaborative research from different disciplines — social sciences, computer science, psychology, cultural anthropology, and mathematics, to name a few. This special issue represents a solid step to advance the emerging field.