Leveraging contextual information to explore posting and linking behaviors of bloggers

摘要

Tile last decade has seen an explosion in blogging and the blogosphere is continuing to grow, having a large global reach and many vibrant communities. Researchers have been pouring over blog data with the goal of finding communities, tracking what people are saying, finding influencers, and using many social network analytic tools to analyze the underlying social networks embedded within the blogosphere. One of the key technical problems with analyzing large social networks such as those embedded in the blogosphere is that there are many links between individuals and we often do not know the context or meaning of those links. This is problematic because it makes it difficult if not impossible to tease out the true communities, their behavior, how information flows, and who the central players are (if any). This paper seeks to further our understanding of how to analyze large blog networks and what they can tell us. We analyze I.24M blogs posted by 298K bloggers over a period of three weeks. These bloggers span private blog sites through large blog-sites such as livejournal and blogspot. We first characterize the behavior of bloggers, validating some (but not all) common beliefs about how often bloggers post, how long their posts are, who they link to and how much reciprocity there is in links. We then take a look at bloggers from the larger blog sites to understand whether and how they differ in terms of these metrics. Finally, we extend our analysis to focus on contextual links: what is the textual content of the blog which had a link. We identify topics from the textual content of all the blog posts and use these to tag links based on the topics that were discussed in the blog.