ABSTRACT
We must better understand the information ecology of these new publication methods in order to make them and the information they provide more useful, trustworthy, and reliable. Doing this requires mining such systems to find various kinds of information, including finding communities based on a combination of topic, bias, and underlying beliefs; identifying influential authors and blogs within a community; discovering the source of beliefs and monitoring their diffusion; determining trustworthy sources of information about a particular topic; and learning what opinions and beliefs characterize a community and how do these opinions change.
