Authors:
Ying Zhou
and
Joseph Davis
Affiliation:
School of Information Technologie, The University of Sydney, Australia
Keyword(s):
Weblog, community, social network, social tie.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Communities of Interest
;
Searching and Browsing
;
Social Networks and Organizational Culture
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Interfaces and Applications
Abstract:
In this paper, we report a two level study on weblog link structures. At the micro level, we carried out an indepth
investigation of individual weblogs. Our goal was to obtain some preliminary understanding of the
different types of links that might indicate underlying communities of bloggers. Complete and detailed link
data was collected from eight weblogs followed by a variety of analyses. The result shows that both
incoming and outgoings follow Zipf like distribution in terms of the sources of those links. These suggest
clustering patterns (communities) within the whole blogspace. We also examine the temporal aspects of
weblogs. The average life span of a weblog entry is fairly long in most of our sample cases. In addition,
analysis on individual comment authors shows that in average, active comment authors maintain a rather
long relationship with a certain weblog. It provides evidence that historical data may be useful in
understanding weblog communities. On a larger sca
le, we developed a program to collect complete link
data from large number of interconnected weblogs and performed cluster analysis on it. Communities with
common topics are successfully extracted using those link data.
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