Cyberspace has diversified and pluralized people’s daily experiences of religion in unprecedented ways. By studying several websites and weblogs that have a religious orientation, different layers of religious authority including “religious hierarchy, structures, ideology, and sources” (Campbell, 2009) can be identified. Also, using Weber’s definition of the three types of authority, “rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic” (1968), the specific type of authority that is being presented on blogosphere can be recognized. The Internet presents a level of liberty for the discussion of sensitive topics in any kind of religious cyberspace, specifically the Islamic one. In this way, the Internet is expanding the number and range of Muslim voices, which may pose problems for traditional forms of religious authority or may suggest new forms of authority in the Islamic world. The interaction between the Internet and religion is often perceived as contradictory, especially when it is religion at its most conservative practice. While the international and national applications of the Internet have increased vastly, local religious communities, especially fundamentalists, perceived this new technology as a threat to their local cultures and practices. If we look at the Internet as a central phenomenon of contemporary modernity that interacts with practiced fundamentalist religious traditions, we can ask how broad the interactions are between religious fundamentalism and the Internet and whether these relations can be reconciled. More specifically, this thesis presents a study of the junction of the Internet and religious fundamentalism reviewing the presentation of Shiite religious authority on the Persian blogosphere. As a case study, Persian weblogs are studied for content analysis for this thesis. Weblogs’ texts are analyzed to find evidences for Shiite beliefs and shared identity, usages and interpretations of the main Shiite religious texts, references to the role of recognized Shiite leaders, and descriptions of Shiite structural patterns of practices and organizations. This research will demonstrate how the Internet has been culturally constructed, modified, and adapted to the Iranian community’s needs and how the Shiite fundamentalist community of Iran has been affected by it. Based on one of the most structured research in this area, the study by Baezilai-Nahon and Barzilai (2005), in this article I identify four principal dimensions of religious fundamentalism as they interact with the Internet: hierarchy, patriarchy, discipline, and seclusion.

abstract: Analysis of political texts, which contains a huge amount of personal political opinions, sentiments, and emotions towards powerful individuals, leaders, organizations, and a large number of people, is an interesting task, which can lead to discover interesting interactions between the political parties and people. Recently, political blogosphere plays an increasingly important role in politics, as a forum for debating political issues. Most of the political weblogs are biased towards their political parties, and they generally express their sentiments towards their issues (i.e. leaders, topics etc.,) and also towards issues of the opposing parties. In this thesis, I have modeled the above interactions/debate as a sentimental bi-partite graph, a bi-partite graph with Blogs forming vertices of a disjoint set, and the issues (i.e. leaders, topics etc.,) forming the other disjoint set,and the edges between the two sets representing the sentiment of the blogs towards the issues. I have used American Political blog data to model the sentimental bi- partite graph, in particular, a set of popular political liberal and conservative blogs that have clearly declared positions. These blogs contain discussion about social, political, economic issues and related key individuals in their conservative/liberal view. To be more focused and more polarized, 22 most popular liberal/conservative blogs of a particular time period, May 2008 - October 2008(because of high intensity of debate and discussions), just before the presidential elections, was considered, involving around 23,800 articles. This thesis involves solving the questions: a) which is the most liberal/conservative blogs on the web? b) Who is on which side of debate and what are the issues? c) Who are the important leaders? d) How do you model the relationship between the participants of the debate and the underlying issues? / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2012

Com o aumento dos usuários acessando a internet no Brasil, cresce a quantidade de conteúdo produzido por brasileiros. Assim se torna importante classificar os melhores autores para que se tenha mais confiança nos textos lidos. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação faz um estudo sobre a descoberta de autoridades em tópicos na blogosfera brasileira. O escopo de estudo e análise é a plataforma de publicação de blogs, Blogspot, sobre os blogueiros que se identificam como brasileiros. Para tanto, foram coletados nove milhões de postagens do ano de 2012 e considerados os comentários como fonte de relacionamento entre os blogueiros para gerar uma rede social. Essa rede foi usada para experimentos do algoritmo de identificação de autoridades em tópicos. O algoritmo utilizado como base é o Topic PageRank, separando os diversos tópicos da blogosfera pelas tags que os usuários definem em suas postagens e posteriormente construindo a lista das autoridades em tais tópicos. Experimentos realizados demonstram que o método proposto resulta em melhor ranqueamento que o algoritmo original do PageRank. Cabe salientar que foi feita uma caracterização dos dados coletados por um questionário aplicado a quatro mil autores. / With the intesification of users accessing the Internet in Brazil, the amount of content produced by Brazilians increases. Thus, it becomes important to classify the best authors to have more confidence in the texts read. In this sense, this work presents a study on subject of topic authorities discovery in the Brazilian blogosphere. The scope of the study is the Blogspot platform, focusing on bloggers who identify themselves as Brazilians. To this end, we collected nine millions posts in the year of 2012 and considered the comments as a source of relationship between bloggers to generate a social network. This network was used for performing experiments considering the proposed approach to identify topic authorities. The algorithm used is based on the Topic PageRank, which can separate the different blogosphere’s topics by tags that users use on their posts, and then building the list of authorities on such topics. The experiments conducted show that the proposed approach results in better ranking than the original PageRank algorithm. We also characterize the collected database with a survey of over four thousand authors.

Com o aumento dos usuários acessando a internet no Brasil, cresce a quantidade de conteúdo produzido por brasileiros. Assim se torna importante classificar os melhores autores para que se tenha mais confiança nos textos lidos. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação faz um estudo sobre a descoberta de autoridades em tópicos na blogosfera brasileira. O escopo de estudo e análise é a plataforma de publicação de blogs, Blogspot, sobre os blogueiros que se identificam como brasileiros. Para tanto, foram coletados nove milhões de postagens do ano de 2012 e considerados os comentários como fonte de relacionamento entre os blogueiros para gerar uma rede social. Essa rede foi usada para experimentos do algoritmo de identificação de autoridades em tópicos. O algoritmo utilizado como base é o Topic PageRank, separando os diversos tópicos da blogosfera pelas tags que os usuários definem em suas postagens e posteriormente construindo a lista das autoridades em tais tópicos. Experimentos realizados demonstram que o método proposto resulta em melhor ranqueamento que o algoritmo original do PageRank. Cabe salientar que foi feita uma caracterização dos dados coletados por um questionário aplicado a quatro mil autores. / With the intesification of users accessing the Internet in Brazil, the amount of content produced by Brazilians increases. Thus, it becomes important to classify the best authors to have more confidence in the texts read. In this sense, this work presents a study on subject of topic authorities discovery in the Brazilian blogosphere. The scope of the study is the Blogspot platform, focusing on bloggers who identify themselves as Brazilians. To this end, we collected nine millions posts in the year of 2012 and considered the comments as a source of relationship between bloggers to generate a social network. This network was used for performing experiments considering the proposed approach to identify topic authorities. The algorithm used is based on the Topic PageRank, which can separate the different blogosphere’s topics by tags that users use on their posts, and then building the list of authorities on such topics. The experiments conducted show that the proposed approach results in better ranking than the original PageRank algorithm. We also characterize the collected database with a survey of over four thousand authors.

The purpose of this thesis is to find ways to make the extent and constant movement in the blogosphere visible. An application has been developed using C# and OpenGL. The application is an interactive screensaver to be run on the Windows platform. It visualizes data combining 3D and 2D elements. Geographical data is rendered using a model of the Earth, where the blog posts are constantly updated. Various statistics are displayed to give information on the current state of the blogosphere.

Com o aumento dos usuários acessando a internet no Brasil, cresce a quantidade de conteúdo produzido por brasileiros. Assim se torna importante classificar os melhores autores para que se tenha mais confiança nos textos lidos. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação faz um estudo sobre a descoberta de autoridades em tópicos na blogosfera brasileira. O escopo de estudo e análise é a plataforma de publicação de blogs, Blogspot, sobre os blogueiros que se identificam como brasileiros. Para tanto, foram coletados nove milhões de postagens do ano de 2012 e considerados os comentários como fonte de relacionamento entre os blogueiros para gerar uma rede social. Essa rede foi usada para experimentos do algoritmo de identificação de autoridades em tópicos. O algoritmo utilizado como base é o Topic PageRank, separando os diversos tópicos da blogosfera pelas tags que os usuários definem em suas postagens e posteriormente construindo a lista das autoridades em tais tópicos. Experimentos realizados demonstram que o método proposto resulta em melhor ranqueamento que o algoritmo original do PageRank. Cabe salientar que foi feita uma caracterização dos dados coletados por um questionário aplicado a quatro mil autores. / With the intesification of users accessing the Internet in Brazil, the amount of content produced by Brazilians increases. Thus, it becomes important to classify the best authors to have more confidence in the texts read. In this sense, this work presents a study on subject of topic authorities discovery in the Brazilian blogosphere. The scope of the study is the Blogspot platform, focusing on bloggers who identify themselves as Brazilians. To this end, we collected nine millions posts in the year of 2012 and considered the comments as a source of relationship between bloggers to generate a social network. This network was used for performing experiments considering the proposed approach to identify topic authorities. The algorithm used is based on the Topic PageRank, which can separate the different blogosphere’s topics by tags that users use on their posts, and then building the list of authorities on such topics. The experiments conducted show that the proposed approach results in better ranking than the original PageRank algorithm. We also characterize the collected database with a survey of over four thousand authors.

Ten years ago, the only contenders for the role of setting the fashion media agenda were mainstream fashion media magazines such as Vogue. With the evolution of blogging and the popularity of blog sites associated with magazine websites, a new contender was born: the fashion-themed blog. Now mainstream fashion media outlets and fashion bloggers sit side-by-side in the front row at designer fashion shows covering fashion news and trends. This study focused on ten elite fashion-themed blogs (fashion blogs) reporting on women’s fashion and ten mainstream fashion media websites during the summer 2016 fashion season looking retrospectively at the fashion forecast from October 2015 New York Fashion Week. The study examined how media outlets respond to fashion blogs and whether the blogs were used as sources by mainstream fashion media or vice a versa. This study has filled a research gap by conducting the first analysis examining fashion blogs through the lens of agenda setting. This research uncovered a media landscape in transition with fashion bloggers and mainstream fashion media communicating in a new and different way. Communicating fashion news is no longer a one-way street controlled by mainstream fashion media magazines. Instead it is a two-way street where each outlet uses the other and neither plays the role of lead agenda setter. This new synergy suggests the acceptance of fashion blogs as credible sources for fashion news and potential agenda setters for the fashion community. The relationship between bloggers and mainstream fashion media also creates excitement regarding trends because fashion bloggers have the ability to instantly comment and generate buzz on a trend when the mainstream fashion media are reporting on other issues or waiting for their magazines to be published. Out of the five trends studied, denim was the leading trend with 44 percent of the posts or articles discussing denim. With every trend, bloggers were present in the five earliest published posts or articles and continued to post on the trends throughout the study period. Style.com dominated the mainstream fashion media landscape, with 25 published articles. For fashion bloggers, Gal Meets Glam and Atlantic Pacific tied with 19 blog posts each. Over 57.6 percent of the total blog posts and blog articles linked to fashion designer websites where readers could purchase the trend being discussed. Fashion bloggers did not quote sources in their posts; 74 blog posts and articles recognized no sources at all. Understanding the new relationship between fashion bloggers and fashion magazine websites will help guide future reporters of fashion and fashion trends.

The aim of this thesis is to identify opportunities and ways of using blogs for marketing purposes, to give a basic overview of the state of the blogospere in the Czech republic and to evaluate the importance of blogs as a PR tool. The thesis is divided into 2 parts - theoretical a practical. The theoretical part deals with the topic PR, its definition, pros and cons, classification, strategical PR process, PR tools, evaluation of efectiveness and PR on the Internet. The following chapter is about blogs and - besides their definition, history or typology - describes also how they can be used in pursuance of communication of companies. Also results of the research Blogbarometer 2015 are introduced there. The practical part comprises of interviews with bloggers and companies and results of the questionnaire among blog readers. The final chapter includes a case study, the purpose of which is to demonstrate possible ways of cooperation with bloggers using an example of a particular company.

This thesis is devoted to blogs and their commercialization, a phenomenon of the on-line world for last few years. The aim of this work is to explore several Czech lifestyle blogs and to find out how much commercial content there is, also how the audience reacts to this content as well as how the bloggers themselves approach commercial content. In the beginning the development of blogs is described, both in the Czech and global environment. The characteristic features of blogs from different perspectives on the issues are also described. The development of blogs is then set in the context of events that made it possible at all. Furthermore, attention is paid also to the process of commercialization of content on the blogs and the possibilities monetizing the blogs' content. Emphasis is placed primarily on a detailed description of influencer marketing and its current situation, but it also discusses affiliate marketing and the use of public relations tools on blogs. The research part provides an insight into the issue of Czech blogs and the current blogosphere. First the chosen blogs are described and set in the context of the Czech blogosphere, then, based on a detailed content analysis, the level of commercial content on the selected blogs is described as well as how the audience reacts to it....

TITLE: Use of information and communication technologies in English language teaching AUTHOR: Bc. Martin Klán DEPARTMENT: Department of School & Social Education SUPERVISOR: PhDr. RNDr. Hana Voňková, PhD., PhD. ABSTRACT: Both foreign and Czech literature point out that information and communication technologies are becoming more and more integral part of education. This presented diploma thesis provides basic outline of information and communication technologies and possibilities of their use with respect to English language teaching. This thesis tries to outline effective use of ICT in English language teaching and focuses mainly on electronic communication, the Internet calling and features of blogging. The aim of the thesis is to find out pupils'attitudes towards English language teaching at Secondary Vocational School in Hořovice, their previous experience with electronic communication, their preferred and dispreferred activities during English language teaching and finally their opinion on using the Internet calling and e-mail by means of a questionnaire and data analysis. Possibility of using electronic communication and calling via the Internet in English language teaching is realized as a project.