…and start my own weblog. Well, actually, I think weblogs have moved beyond hype by now, the fact that I’m opening one being living proof of that (I was one of the last people to get mobile phone-wise). Anyway, what is a blog anyway?
I’ve been doing some research on that subject lately, as I am involved in a project of the Govcom.org foundation. In this project, which consists of building a system that analyses blogs and news sources and allows the user to perform a comparative analysis, we had a need for an algorithm that determines for a given url whether it was a blog or not. Content-wise, blogs vary a lot. Some see their blog is a sort of fancy bookmark file, others see it as a public clip board, where they can copy-paste stuff that interests them. Yet others provide only their own content, opinions and thoughts in reaction to events or the news or spontaneous thoughts (I consider myself part of this last category). However easy it is for us humans to see, after looking at a couple of entries, if indeed the site is a blog based on these semantic categories it is very difficult to come up with a computer program that does this.
We therefore explored more syntactic methods: look at the form. There are a couple of properties all blogs share: they contain a list of temporally ordered items. Other properties might be that the software used to host the blog leaves some distinct traces in the html code, or a specific url indicating that the site is hosted on a site that is dedicated to hosting blogs. It turns out that based on these properties, a reasonably succesfull blog detector can be made. More on this perhaps at a later time. We are on a looming deadline with the project, and this blog detection tool is just a small component of the final system. Perhaps in the future this could be a project a student in newmedia or artificial intelligence could be working on (reminder to oneself: see if professors are interested in making this a project).

Anyway, back to my own blog. As said, I am of the opinion that a blog should be more than a public clip board. I will therefore talk in this blog about my own experience in politics (I’m actively involved in local and to a lesser extend european politics), thoughts and opinions on the way the world is in general and explore some of my interests by writing book reviews (I mostly read sci-fi), talking about music I like and ponder on scienctific news. I’m still thinking about categories, and how to split up the entries. My thoughts on local and national politics will probably be in Dutch, other categories will probably contain English entries exclusively. Let’s see where this takes me!