The Microblog Explorer project is about gathering URLs from social networks (FriendFeed, identi.ca, and Reddit) to use them as web crawling seeds. At least by the last two of them a crawl appears to be manageable in terms of both API accessibility and corpus size, which is not the case concerning Twitter for example.

Hypotheses:

1. These platforms account for a relative diversity of user profiles.
2. Documents that are most likely to be important are being shared.
3. It becomes possible to cover languages which are more rarely seen on the Internet, below the English-speaking spammer’s radar.
4. Microblogging services are …

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