AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs will be held 27-29 May 2006 at Stanford University. Submitted papers are due 7 October 2005. The scope is broad, encompasing NLP, machine learning, socia networks, semantic web, etc.

Note: they mean blogs and not logs generated by web servers — I just noticed the potential ambiguity. I guess analyzing ‘web logs’ was a hot topic five or six years ago whereas today, the space makes it ‘been there, done that’.

Brian Livingston has an interesting stat on RSS aggregators. This is based on a representative sample taken from hits to feedburner.
Here’s the top 10 —

1. Bloglines — 19.49%
2. NetNewsWire — 10.07%
3. iTunes — 9.53%
4. Firefox Live Bookmarks — 7.25%
5. iPodder — 7.17%
6. My Yahoo — 6.68%
7. FeedDemon — 4.23%
8. NewsGator Online — 3.83%
9. Reader not identified — 3.07%
10. Pluck — 2.07%

Via Andy Lark.

The Computing Research Association has been publishing and distributing by email a quarterly newsletter, the CRA Bulletin, containing links to items of interest to the computing research community. The CRA Bulletin has now been refactored as a blog complete with an RSS feed.

German manufacturing company Vorwerk has partnered with Infineon in Munich to develop an electronic carpet that wirelessly navigates a robotic vacuum over every square inch of a floor. The special carpet has an embedded grid of RFID chips. Using an RFID grid for navigation is a novel use of the technology with many potential applications beyond carpet sweeping. Link

Geektronica is reporting on the increased sophistication of spam blogs.

Second, spammers are becoming less obvious by creating posts that link to actual news articles (complete with excerpts); by all appearances, these blogs are just like scores of real blogs. But if you look at the code of the page, there are tons of external spam links, cleverly hidden by CSS. Here is an example: Mario’s News Archive Posts (to which I’m avoiding giving Google-props by using the rel=�nofollow� attribute). With this additional layer of subterfuge, it’s remotely possible that someone will even link to “Mario’s� blog from their highly-ranked site. Check it out - it’s quite slick. It even auto-reloads every few seconds (though I’m not sure why).

Distinguishing this sort of spam from a real blog looks pretty tough, regardless of whether it’s a person or a machine trying to make the decision.