Identify Intimate Social Relationship in Blogsphere

Abstract

Weblog has become a kind of important information resource on the Internet for it can make people publish individual experiences and opinion easily. Blogsphere has evolved vast and complex social network through blogrolls, citation, reading, comments and other social activities. More attentions are paid on related research for the prevalence of blog. The paper proposes the definition of intimate relationship based on comments links to analyze social network in the blogsphere. Blog social network is modeled as weighted directed graph and every weight depends on the frequency of social relationship between bloggers. And then blog intimate friends circle can be extracted with identification algorithm proposed by the paper. Blog data from one of famous blog sites (Hibaidu) in China is collected and taken as our study object. Through analyzing the blog dataset, we found that the intimate relationships are kept more stably and different bloggers maintain intimate relationship with the same blogger but they have no social interactions, which is named as the phenomena of familiar strange friends. These findings will contribute to the understanding of blogsphere and providing better blog services for users.