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Word-of-mouth in the Internet is rapidly increasing, but the dissemination of this information is sometime difficult to interpret. This paper presents a visualisation platform (BrandMap). It was used to structure data of brand association distribution in the blogosphere as a case study that analyses the word-of-mouth of two smartphone brands in Brazil. BrandMap is a prototype that was developed based on extensive research about word-of-mouth in the blogosphere and how to visualize brands monitoring. BrandMap uses a novel approach for information visualization of complex data. The result was the evaluation of BrandMap analyses that compared the user's perception about the advantages and disadvantages of two brands in social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The development of the Web brought an interactive environment in which an increasing number of users are sharing their knowledge and opinions. Blogs are a growing part of this environment. Considering the rate at which knowledge is created daily in the blogosphere, such an amount of information could be used by several applications. However, the infeasibility of manual information extraction from blogs demands the development of new computational approaches. This context is the rationale for the blog crawlers, software programs capable of searching and extracting information from blogs. This paper proposes a framework that helps the user in the task of building blog crawlers. The proposed framework provides further access to several tools, simplifying the overall development of new applications. We also present an algorithm for locating the textual content within blogs. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our framework by means of an instantiation of it that achieved a precision and recall of 73.46% and 71.92%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]