The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is a unique venue that brings together researchers from the disciplines of NLP, Social Psychology, Data Mining, Sociology and Visualization to increase our understanding of social media in all its incarnations. Research that blends social science and technology is especially encouraged.

The 2010 meeting will be held in Washington DC, where government innovators are experimenting with the use of social media to increase transparency and better engage with the citizenry. The conference will take advantage of this venue to invite leaders from "The Goverati" to share their experiences in the use of social media.

The conference brings together researchers working in a number of disciplines with a broad array of social data:

DISCIPLINES
Computational Linguistics/NLP
Text Mining/Data Mining
Psychology
SNA, Sociology
Visualization
HCI
Graph theory, concrete analysis and simulation of graphical models
MEDIA
Weblogs, including comments
Microblogs
Wikis (wikipedia)
Forums, usenet
Community media sites: youtube, flickr
TOPICS INCLUDE
Psychological, personality-based and ethnographic studies of social media
Analyzing the relationship between social media and mainstream media
Centrality/influence of social media publications and authors
Ranking/relevance of blogs; web page ranking based on blogs
Social network analysis; communities identification; expertise and authority discovery; collaborative filtering
Trust; reputation; recommendation systems
Human computer interaction; social media tools; navigation and visualization
Subjectivity in textual data; sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction
Text categorization; topic recognition; demographic/gender/age identification
Trend identification and tracking; time series forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media
New social media applications; interfaces; interaction techniques