Via John of Arggh!: The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding a $450,000 project that appears to be an analytics crawler to go after international blogs, since "there is too much actionable information for the analyst to properly analyze." (You can say that again.)
Seeing "Ontologically-Based Link Analysis" in the title makes me a little nervous: the seething blogosphere is not a good place for one-size-fits-all world views, particularly if 'international' implies this project will tackle multiple cultures with (shall we way) divergent world views. OTOH, it sounds like the peculiar nature of the medium is being considered, e.g.,
“Blog entries have a different structure,” Ulicny said. “They are typically short and are about something external to the blog posting itself , such as a news event. It’s not uncommon for a blogger to simply state, ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ and then link to a news story.” .... there might not be much of interest in the blog posting, yet the fact that the blogger called attention to this story can be significant to understanding what matters.
Kudos to the AF team for getting it: "“The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analysts." And if this project does work out, I'm sure we can find some civilian applications...
