Abstract
Anyone can easily know the number of people who submit messages, articles, and comments to a social media web site, for example, blogs, Internet forums, and bulletin boards, by enumerating the IDs. However, it is very difficult to detect the population of a community that includes lurkers who are interested in such a web site but have not submitted any messages. It is not simple task, even if one refers to the log data on the servers for social media. The population of lurkers is very important information for many applications. In this paper, a new method, based on the dynamics of complex systems, is proposed to estimate the population of a social media site that includes lurkers. As shown in recent research of Internet forums, the message distribution tends to follow a power law and the proposed method utilizes this fact. This method only needs the number of messages posted per user, and, therefore, all readers can use this method. Moreover, one does not need any language-specific knowledge. In this paper, the proposed method is confirmed by two practical experiments.
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Kubo, M., Naruse, K., Sato, H. (2012). Community Size Estimation of Internet Forum by Posted Article Distribution. In: Watanabe, T., Jain, L.C. (eds) Innovations in Intelligent Machines – 2. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 376. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23190-2_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23190-2_16
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