irBlogs: A standard collection for studying Persian bloggers

• irBlogs is a standard collection of 560,000 bloggers for studying Persian bloggers.
• The writing style of Persian bloggers is analyzed.
• IT, society, culture, politics and sports are the main interests of the bloggers.
• News agencies, knowledge-bases and other social networks have a great impact.
• The collection is standardized for development of blog retrieval algorithms.

A large number of internet users share their knowledge and opinions in online social networks like forums, weblogs, etc. This fact has attracted many researchers from different fields to study online social networks. The Persian language is one of the dominant languages in the Middle East which is the official language of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan; so, a large number of Persians are active in online social networks. Despite this fact, very few studies exist about Persian social networks. In this paper we will study the characteristics of Persian bloggers based on a new collection, named irBlogs. The collection contains nearly 5 million posts and the network of more than 560,000 Persian bloggers which assures the reliability of the results of this study. Some of the analyzed characteristics are: the similarities and the differences between formal Persian and the language style that is used by Persian bloggers, the interests of the bloggers and the impact of other web resources on Persian blogosphere. Our analysis show that IT, sports, society, culture and politics are the main interests of Persian bloggers. Also, analysis of the links that are shared by Persian bloggers shows that news agencies, knowledge-bases and other social networks have a great impact on Persian bloggers and they are interested to share multimedia content.