Personalized recommendation of popular blog articles for mobile applications

Abstract

Weblogs have emerged as a new communication and publication medium on the Internet for diffusing the latest useful information. Providing value-added mobile services, such as blog articles, is increasingly important to attract mobile users to mobile commerce, in order to benefit from the proliferation and convenience of using mobile devices to receive information any time and anywhere. However, there are a tremendous number of blog articles, and mobile users generally have difficulty in browsing weblogs owing to the limitations of mobile devices. Accordingly, providing mobile users with blog articles that suit their particular interests is an important issue. Very little research, however, has focused on this issue. In this work, we propose a novel Customized Content Service on a mobile device (m-CCS) to filter and push blog articles to mobile users. The m-CCS includes a novel forecasting approach to predict the latest popular blog topics based on the trend of time-sensitive popularity of weblogs. Mobile users may, however, have different interests regarding the latest popular blog topics. Thus, the m-CCS further analyzes the mobile users' browsing logs to determine their interests, which are then combined with the latest popular blog topics to derive their preferred blog topics and articles. A novel hybrid approach is proposed to recommend blog articles by integrating personalized popularity of topic clusters, item-based collaborative filtering (CF) and attention degree (click times) of blog articles. The experiment result demonstrates that the m-CCS system can effectively recommend mobile users' desired blog articles with respect to both popularity and personal interests. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.