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

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 7710))

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Abstract

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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science & Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Imrul Kayes, Xiaoning Qian & Adriana Iamnitchi

  2. Department of Sociology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    John Skvoretz

Authors
  1. Imrul Kayes
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  2. Xiaoning Qian
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  3. John Skvoretz
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  4. Adriana Iamnitchi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (LSIR), School for Computer and Communication Science (I&C), EPFL-IC,, Bâtiment BC, Station 14, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Karl Aberer

  2. Department of Sociology, ICS, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 31, 9712 TG, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Andreas Flache

  3. Groningen Center for Social Complexity Studies, Nettelbosje 2, 9747 AE, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Wander Jager

  4. Georgia Institute of Technology, KACB, room 3340,School of Computer Science, College of Computing, 266 Ferst Dr, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  5. Tsinghua University, Rm 1-308, FIT Building, 100084, Beijing, China

    Jie Tang

  6. Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), Anna van Saksenlaan 10, 2593 HT, Den Haag, The Netherlands

    Christophe Guéret

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kayes, I., Qian, X., Skvoretz, J., Iamnitchi, A. (2012). How Influential Are You: Detecting Influential Bloggers in a Blogging Community. In: Aberer, K., Flache, A., Jager, W., Liu, L., Tang, J., Guéret, C. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7710. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35386-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35386-4_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35385-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35386-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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