Blogs (short for weblogs) are nowadays an important part of the Web, and an incredibly attractive social media platform. Blogs are used by companies, professionals, and hobbyists to reach out to an audience, promote products and services, or simply discuss an interesting topic. Thanks to the abundance of web-publishing tools and services that makes it easy for non-technical users to post their content, setting up a personal blog is a matter of minutes.

From the point of view of a data miner, blogs are the perfect platform to practice text mining. This chapter focuses on two main topics: how to get textual data from blogs and how to apply NLP on such data.

While NLP is a complex field that deserves more than a book just to get started, we're taking a pragmatic approach and introducing the basic theory with practical examples.