A Qualitative Method to Find Influencers Using Similarity-based Approach in the Blogosphere

Current blog systems rank ‘A-list’ bloggers, but they are not necessarily influential. To differentiate influential bloggers from popular bloggers, we present important groundwork for identifying influential bloggers by weighting readers based on homophily and vulnerability with bloggers. We develop the Quantifying Influence Model (QIM), which attempts to measure the influence score of bloggers. QIM is composed of two components: (1) interpersonal similarity presents the interaction among bloggers and like-minded readers, and (2) degree of information propagation represents how many readers a blogger has, where the readers diffuse the blog posts via scrapping engagements. Our study shows that weighting blog social ties can differentiate influential bloggers from popular bloggers, and what make bloggers influential or popular.

[1]  Bernard J. Jansen,et al.  Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth , 2009 .

[2]  Mark S. Granovetter.  Threshold Models of Collective Behavior , 1978, American Journal of Sociology.

[3]  Paolo Avesani,et al.  Using Tags and Clustering to Identify Topic-Relevant Blogs , 2007, ICWSM.

[4]  Qi He,et al.  TwitterRank: finding topic-sensitive influential twitterers , 2010, WSDM '10.

[5]  Kathleen C. Schwartzman,et al.  DIFFUSION IN ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: From Hybrid Corn to Poison Pills , 2007 .

[6]  Cameron A. Marlow.  Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community , 2004 .

[7]  Iraklis Varlamis,et al.  BlogRank: ranking weblogs based on connectivity and similarity features , 2006, AAA-IDEA '06.

[8]  J. Jacoby,et al.  Consumer Behavior , 2024 .

[9]  D. Watts,et al.  Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation , 2007 .

[10]  M. Schreurs.  From the Bottom Up , 2008 .

[11]  N. Lee,et al.  Word of mouth communication within online communities: Conceptualizing the online social network , 2007 .

[12]  Noah E. Friedkin,et al.  A Structural Theory of Social Influence: List of Tables and Figures , 1998 .

[13]  D. Strang,et al.  DIFFUSION IN ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: From Hybrid Corn to Poison Pills , 1998 .

[14]  T. Valente.  Social network thresholds in the diffusion of innovations , 1996 .

[15]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments , 2007, ICWSM.

[16]  Christian Sternitzke,et al.  Similarity measures for document mapping: A comparative study on the level of an individual scientist , 2007, Scientometrics.

[17]  P. Lazarsfeld,et al.  6. Katz, E. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications , 1956 .

[18]  Philip S. Yu,et al.  Identifying the influential bloggers in a community , 2008, WSDM '08.

[19]  Christopher H. Brooks,et al.  An Analysis of the Effectiveness of Tagging in Blogs , 2006, AAAI Spring Symposium: Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs.

[20]  B. Wellman.  The School Child’s Choice of Companions , 1926 .

[21]  Noah E. Friedkin,et al.  A Structural Theory of Social Influence: List of Tables and Figures , 1998 .

[22]  M. McPherson,et al.  Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks , 2001 .

[23]  T. Huston,et al.  Interpersonal attraction and relationships. , 1978, Annual review of psychology.

[24]  P. Lazarsfeld,et al.  Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications , 1956 .

[25]  Eunyoung Moon,et al.  A qualitative method to find influencers using similarity-based approach in the blogosphere , 2011, Int. J. Soc. Comput. Cyber Phys. Syst..

[26]  Ramanathan V. Guha,et al.  Information diffusion through blogspace , 2004, WWW '04.

[27]  Erik Brynjolfsson,et al.  Global Village or Cyberbalkans: Modeling and Measuring the Integration of Electronic Communities , 2005, Manag. Sci..

[28]  Alex Leavitt,et al.  The Influentials : New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter , 2009 .

[29]  Xin Li,et al.  Tag-based social interest discovery , 2008, WWW.

[30]  D. Meadows-Klue.  The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference , 2004 .

[31]  Eytan Adar,et al.  Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace , 2004 .

[32]  Rajeev Motwani,et al.  The PageRank Citation Ranking : Bringing Order to the Web , 1999, WWW 1999.

[33]  Noah E. Friedkin.  A Structural Theory of Social Influence: Measures of the Theoretical Constructs , 1998 .

[34]  Robert Scoble,et al.  Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers , 2006 .

[35]  Erik Qualman.  Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business , 2009 .

[36]  Éva Tardos,et al.  Influential Nodes in a Diffusion Model for Social Networks , 2005, ICALP.

[37]  Inna Kouper,et al.  Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up" , 2005, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[38]  杉浦 榮三.  Personal Influence The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication By Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld(The Free Press, 1955) , 1957 .

[39]  Jon M. Kleinberg,et al.  Feedback effects between similarity and social influence in online communities , 2008, KDD.

[40]  Mark S. Granovetter.  The Strength of Weak Ties , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.