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Overview of the TREC 2006 Blog Track

The rise on the Internet of blogging, the creation of journal-like web page logs, has created a highly dynamic subset of the World Wide Web that evolves and responds to real-world events. Indeed, blogs (or weblogs) have recently emerged as a new grassroots publishing medium. The so-called blogosphere (the collection of blogs on the Internet) opens up several new interesting research areas. Blogs have many interesting features: entries are added in chronological order, sometimes at a high volume. In addition, many blogs are created by their authors, not intended for any sizable audience, but purely as a mechanism for self-expression. Extremely accessible blog software has facilitated the act of blogging to a wide-ranging audience, their blogs reflecting their opinions, philosophies and emotions. Traditional media tends to focus on “heavy-hitting” blogs devoted to politics, punditry and technology. However, there are many different genres of blogs, some written around a specific topic, some covering several, and others talking about personal daily life [3]. The Blog track began this year, with the aim to explore the information seeking behaviour in the blogosphere. For this purpose, a new large-scale test collection, namely the TREC Blog06 collection, has been created. In the first pilot run of the track in 2006, we had two tasks, a main task (opinion retrieval) and an open task. The opinion retrieval task focuses on a specific aspect of blogs: the opinionated nature of many blogs. The second task was introduced to allow participants the opportunity to influence the determination of a suitable second task (for 2007) on other aspects of blogs, such as the temporal/event-related nature of many blogs, or the severity of spam in the blogosphere. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a short description of the newly created Blog06 test collection. Section 3 describes the opinion task, and provides an overview of the submitted runs of the participants. Section 4 describes the open task and the submitted proposals. We provide concluding remarks in Section 5.