Web Science emerges

The relentless rise in Web pages and links is creating emergent properties, from social networks to virtual identity theft, that are transforming society. A new discipline, Web Science, aims to discover how Web traits arise and how they can be harnessed or held in check to benefit society. Important advances are beginning to be made; more work can solve major issues such as securing privacy and conveying trust

Searching for superspreaders of information in real-world social media

A number of predictors have been suggested to detect the most influential spreaders of information in online social media across various domains such as Twitter or Facebook. In particular, degree, PageRank, k-core and other centralities have been adopted to rank the spreading capability of users in information dissemination media. So far, validation of the proposed predictors has been done by simulating the spreading dynamics rather than following real information flow in social networks. Consequently, only model-dependent contradictory results have been achieved so far for the best predictor. Here, we address this issue directly. We search for influential spreaders by following the real spreading dynamics in a wide range of networks. We find that the widely-used degree and PageRank fail in ranking users' influence. We find that the best spreaders are consistently located in the k-core across dissimilar social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal and scientific publishing in the American Physical Society. Furthermore, when the complete global network structure is unavailable, we find that the sum of the nearest neighbors' degree is a reliable local proxy for user's influence. Our analysis provides practical instructions for optimal design of strategies for "viral" information dissemination in relevant applications.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Numerical Investigation of Metrics for Epidemic Processes on Graphs

This study develops the epidemic hitting time (EHT) metric on graphs measuring the expected time an epidemic starting at node $a$ in a fully susceptible network takes to propagate and reach node $b$. An associated EHT centrality measure is then compared to degree, betweenness, spectral, and effective resistance centrality measures through exhaustive numerical simulations on several real-world network data-sets. We find two surprising observations: first, EHT centrality is highly correlated with effective resistance centrality; second, the EHT centrality measure is much more delocalized compared to degree and spectral centrality, highlighting the role of peripheral nodes in epidemic spreading on graphs.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables, In Proceedings of 2015 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computer

Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams

Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We introduce an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events. We describe a Web service that leverages this framework to track political memes in Twitter and help detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Finally, we discuss promising preliminary results on the detection of suspicious memes via supervised learning based on features extracted from the topology of the diffusion networks, sentiment analysis, and crowdsourced annotations

Zahar Prilepin's blogs as the new modern literary creativity measurement

Sodobni tehnološki razvoj vpliva na literaturo, ne le na dojemanje in branje knjig, ampak tudi na način, kako pisatelji ustvarjajo in objavljajo svoje literarne umetnine. Prilepin kot znan in priljubljen sodobni pisatelj, ki ima v ruskem literarnem okolju uveljavljen položaj, svoje knjige in rusko literaturo promovira s pomočjo blogov. Avtorica članka Prilepinove bloge in druge internetne vire analizira z namenom prikazati njegovo sodelovanje pri ustvarjanju e-literature. Sodobni blogi so razloženi v kontekstu javne literarne sfere, ki v socialni komunikaciji ustvarja edinstvene družbene priložnosti. Dejavnosti pisateljev in literarnih kritikov, ki imajo v literarnem okolju uveljavljen položaj, nedvomno pomembno vplivajo na revolucijo v ruski spletni literaturi, ki jo predstavlja novi literarni žanr. Ta se izraža v široki spletni distribuciji literarnih del in interaktivni komunikaciji avtorja z bralci ter njihovega neposrednega vpliva na avtorjevo nadaljnjo ustvarjalnost. Modern technological development affects literature not only in the form of perception and reading books but also in the way writers create and publish their literary pieces of art. Prilepin, as a famous and popular contemporary writer with a confirmed position in the Russian literary environment, promotes his books and Russian literature using internet blogs. The author attempts to analyse his blogs and other internet resources in order to show Prilepin’s involvement in creating e-literature. Contemporary blogs are explained in the context of the public literary sphere, which creates unique social opportunities in social communication. The activities of writers and literary critics who have a well-established position in the literary environment appear to have an undeniably significant impact on the revolution in Russian web literature that is represented by a new genre of literature, which is expressed in the wide distribution of literary works over the internet and the interactive communication of the author with readers and their direct influence on the author’s further creativity