Finding key bloggers, one post at a time

User generated content in general, and blogs in particular, form an interesting and relatively little explored domain for mining knowledge. We address the task of blog distillation: to find blogs that are principally devoted to a given topic, as opposed to blogs that merely happen to discuss the topic in passing. Working in the setting of statistical language modeling, we model the task by aggregating a blogger's blog posts to collect evidence of relevance to the topic and persistence of interest in the topic. This approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. On top of this baseline, we extend our model by incorporating a number of blog-specific features, concerning document structure, social structure, and temporal structure. These blog-specific features yield further improvements.