Identifying the Influential Bloggers in a Community

by Agarwal et al. (WSDM2008, agarwal2008)

The goal of this article is to provide a method for identifying influential bloggers.

Definitions:

• outlinks: resources referred to by a post's author
• inlinks: resources which refer to that particular post -- collected using the technorati API

The authors define the following four properties of influential bloggers:

• recognitions (=> the post if referred to in many other posts)
• activity generation (the post yields a large number of comments)
• novelty (a large number of outlinks indicates that a post is less likely to be novel)
• eloquence (the length of a post is positively correlated to its influence)

Influence graph: Each post is represented by a node which is characterized by the four properties discussed above. the graph is a directed graph in which edges represent the incoming and outgoing influence flows between nodes.

Finally, the paper also observes and discusses different temporal patterns of influentials (long-term, average-term, transient, and burgeoning).