The power of political weblogs towards political situation in Malaysia

Abstract

In Malaysia, political blog has become one of the most powerful weapons used by political party leaders to reach voters. The use of political blogs gives authority to the blog’s owner to give their opinions, spread information, and share knowledge about political issues in Malaysia with other bloggers or readers. This is because political issue is one of the popular issues and sometimes, political blogs can give pros and cons of the situation in Malaysia. During the last Malaysia’s 12th general election, political blogs have also been used as a tool to provide information and spread rumours about the political issues in Malaysia. In this study, we believe that the concept of blogosphere can build strong community in cyberspace that could have given impact to the political situations in Malaysia and Malaysia’s 12th general election results. We build a web mining application using Artificial Immune System (WMAIS) technique to search and examine web pages and weblogs that are relevant to political issues in Malaysia. The results from WMAIS can be used to analyze connection between political blogs in the social network in order to predict the future trends of public opinions about political situation in Malaysia and to prepare for the next Malaysia’s general election.