Weblogs are a popular way to share personal journals, discuss matters of public opinion, pursue collaborative conversations, and aggregate content on similar topics. Blogs also disseminate new content and novel ideas to communities of interest. But how does content spread across these communities and what are they about? In this paper, we study the links embedded in blog posts to understand how they blogs are connected to each other and what kinds of content are share through such links. Our analysis, based on 8.7 million posts in 1.1 million different blogs across 15 major blog hosting sites, shows that the interconnection structure of blogs is different from that of other online social networks: (a) links are not reciprocal, and (b) local connection structure resembles that of a tree. By looking at the embedded links within blog posts, we show that user generated content, often in the form of videos or photos, is the most common form of content sharing in webblogs. We further study the distribution of 10,000 popularly linked YouTube videos to identify different content categories’ propagation throughout the network: political news spread rapidly and catch the attention of bloggers, while music videos slowly propagate through much larger time spans.
[1]
Thomas M. Lento.
The Ties that Blog: Examining the Relationship Between Social Ties and Continued Participation in the Wallop Weblogging System
,
2006
.
[2]
Lada A. Adamic,et al.
Tracking information epidemics in blogspace
,
2005,
The 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'05).
[3]
Krishna P. Gummadi,et al.
Characterizing social cascades in flickr
,
2008,
WOSN '08.
[4]
Krishna P. Gummadi,et al.
Measurement and analysis of online social networks
,
2007,
IMC '07.
[5]
Ramanathan V. Guha,et al.
Information diffusion through blogspace
,
2004,
WWW '04.
[6]
Priscilla S. Markwood,et al.
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
,
2006
.
[7]
Ravi Kumar,et al.
On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace
,
2003,
WWW '03.