In this paper, we focus on the challenge that users face in processing messages on the web posted in participatory media settings, such as blogs. It is desirable to recommend to users a restricted set of messages that may be most valuable to them. Credibility of a message is an important criteria to judge its value. In our approach, theories developed in sociology, political science and information science are used to design a model for evaluating the credibility of messages that is user-specific and that is sensitive to the social network in which the user resides. To recommend new messages to users, we employ Bayesian learning, built on past user behaviour, integrating new concepts of context and completeness of messages inspired from the strength of weak ties hypothesis, from social network theory. We are able to demonstrate that our method is effective in providing the most credible messages to users and significantly enhances the performance of collaborative filtering recommendation, through a user study on the digg.com dataset.
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