Improving blog exploration through interactive visualization

Blogs are widely used today to publish information on a regular basis. However, users have difficulty in exploring their content and in discovering relevant information. This is due, among other things, to blogs rigid structure, with very long pages, and to the lack of mechanisms for effective navigation and exploration. To overcome these problems, we developed an exploration tool, to help users navigate, browse and visualize blogs. It was developed based on the following four design principles i) a blog should provide an overview of its activity and content to help users identify publication patterns and relevant entries; ii) blogs should present rich compact representations of entries to help readers anticipate the content of posts; iii) comments should have a relevant role, since they convey the social component of the blog; iv) blogs should offer an interactive filtering mechanism to help users explore and find relevant posts. A comparative evaluation with users confirmed the validity of the design principles, since our solution was more efficient, effective and usable than the usual blog interface and the Google Reader.