How Influential Are You: Detecting Influential Bloggers in a Blogging Community

Blogging is a popular activity with high impact on marketing, shaping public opinions, and informing the world about major events from a grassroots point of view. Influential bloggers are recognized by businesses as significant forces for product promotion or demotion, and by oppressive political regimes as serious threats to their power. This paper studies the problem of identifying influential bloggers in a blogging community, BlogCatalog, by using network centrality metrics. Our analysis shows that bloggers are connected in a core-periphery network structure, with the highly influential bloggers well connected with each others forming the core, and the non-influential bloggers at the periphery. The six node centrality metrics we analyzed are highly correlated, showing that an aggregate centrality score as a measure of influence will be stable to variations in centrality metrics.

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