A Case Study on Trust-Based Automated Blog Recommendation Making

We are presented with a situation in which a visitor wants to travel to Malaysia. Several questions arise at this point: Should the visitor believe the information provided in the Malaysian official tourism website? Or should the visitor refer to some other "unofficial" sources like blogs which contain the blogger's own experiences? In the travel domain, almost all information shared in blogs naturally derives from blogger's experiences. Positive correlation might exist between blogger and information. This correlation must point to the fact that users tend to be attracted towards finding information through blogs. To support this crucial issue, a survey on the actual people's opinions in finding the relationship between a person and his/her blog information has been done in the travel blog's domain. Results have shown that user usually prefers to refer to the information mentioned by people they trust or, more accurately, friends rather than other sources. In addition, the previous works on trust and blogs also share an agreement that the positive correlation between a blogger and his/her information should affect the trust value. This survey has created an inspiration for the recommendation systems based on the trust exerted on blog information.