Towards a Personalized Blog Site Recommendation System: A Collaborative Rating Approach

The blogosphere is a part of the Web, enhanced with several characteristics that differentiate blogs from traditional websites. The number of different authors, the multitude of user-provided tags, the inherent connectivity between blogs and bloggers, the high update rate, and the time information attached to each post are some of the features that can be exploited in various information retrieval tasks. Traditional search engines perform poorly on blogs since they do not cover these aspects. In an attempt to exploit these features, this paper proposes a personalized recommendation model, which capitalizes on a collaborative rating mechanism that exploits the hyperlinks between blogs. The model assumes that the intention of a blog owner who creates a link to another blog is to provide a recommendation to the blog readers and quantifies this intention in a local score for the blog being pointed. A set of implicit and explicit links between any two blogs affect the exchanged score. The process is iterative and takes into account the opinion of a set of affiliated blogs and the freshness of links.