Cascading Behavior in Large Blog Graphs

How do blogs cite and influence each other? How do such links evolve? Does the popularity of old blog posts drop exponentially with time? These are some of the questions that we address in this work. Our goal is to build a model that generates realistic cascades, so that it can help us with link prediction and outlier detection. Blogs (weblogs) have become an important medium of information because of their timely publication, ease of use, and wide availability. In fact, they often make headlines, by discussing and discovering evidence about political events and facts. Often blogs link to one another, creating a publicly available record of how information and influence spreads through an underlying social network. Aggregating links from several blog posts creates a directed graph which we analyze to discover the patterns of information propagation in blogspace, and thereby understand the underlying social network. Not only are blogs interesting on their own merit, but our analysis also sheds light on how rumors, viruses, and ideas propagate over social and computer networks. Here we report some surprising findings of the blog linking and information propagation structure, after we analyzed one of the largest available datasets, with 45,000 blogs and ~ 2.2 million blog-postings. Our analysis also sheds light on how rumors, viruses, and ideas propagate over social and computer networks. We also present a simple model that mimics the spread of information on the blogosphere, and produces information cascades very similar to those found in real life

Investigating the Impact of the Blogsphere: Using PageRank to Determine the Distribution of Attention

Much has been written in recent years about the blogosphere and its impact on political, educational and scientific debates. Lately the issue has received significant attention from the industry. As the blogosphere continues to grow, even doubling its size every six months, this paper investigates its apparent impact on the overall Web itself. We use the popular Google PageRank algorithm which employs a model of Web used to measure the distribution of user attention across sites in the blogosphere. The paper is based on an analysis of the PageRank distribution for 8.8 million blogs in 2005 and 2006. This paper addresses the following key questions: How is PageRank distributed across the blogosphere? Does it indicate the existence of measurable, visible effects of blogs on the overall mediasphere? Can we compare the distribution of attention to blogs as characterised by the PageRank with the situation for other forms of Web content? Has there been a growth in the impact of the blogosphere on the Web over the two years analysed here? Finally, it will also be necessary to examine the limitations of a PageRank-centred approach

FINDING HER MASTER’S VOICE: THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE ACTION AMONG FEMALE MUSLIM BLOGGERS

Emerging cyber-collective movements have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite the exponential growth of bloggers in Muslim countries, there is a lack of empirical study of cyber-collective actions in these countries. We analyzed the female Muslim blogosphere because very little research attempts to understand socio-political roles of female bloggers in the system where women are frequently denied freedom of expression. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling cyber-collective movements by utilizing existing social theories on collective action and computational social network analysis. This paper contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. We also observe the transcending nature of cyber-collective movements with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Using the global female Muslim blogosphere, we provide understanding of the complexity and dynamics of cyber-collective action. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to address the lacking fundamental research shedding light on re-framing collective action theory in online environments

Socio-semantic dynamics in a blog network

The blogosphere can be construed as a knowledge network made of bloggers who are interacting through a social network to share, exchange or produce information. We claim that the social and semantic dimensions are essentially co-determined and propose to investigate the co-evolutionary dynamics of the blogosphere by examining two intertwined issues: First, how does knowledge distribution drive new interactions and thus influence the social network topology? Second, which role structural network properties play in the information circulation in the system? We adopt an empirical standpoint by analyzing the semantic and social activity of a portion of the US political blogosphere, monitored on a period of four months

Raising and Rising Voices in Social Media - A Novel Methodological Approach in Studying Cyber-Collective Movements

Emerging cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of systematic methodologies to empirically study such movements in complex online environments. Using the Al-Huwaider online campaign as a case to illustrate our methodology, this contribution attempts to establish a rigorous and fundamental analysis that explains CSMs. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns capturing multi-cultural aspects for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling CSMs by utilizing existing collective action theories and computational social network analysis. This article contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. The proposed methodology provides a rigorous tool to understand the complexity and dynamics of CSMs. Such methodology also assists us in observing the transcending nature of CSMs with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Our study addresses the lack of fundamental research on the formation of CSMs. This research contributes novel methodologies that can be applied to many settings including business, marketing and many others, beyond the exemplary setting chosen here for illustrative purposes

Culture or social interaction? A study of influential factors on weblog design

The importance of blogs and social networking as medium of interactions had gain substantial popularity in mainstream media. Such popularity is due to blogs timely publication, ease of use and wide availability. Blogs hypertext and hyperlinks spread information and influence through an underlying social network. Taking into consideration that past studies on web design have focused on cultural traits on design elements, this paper aims to analyse the patterns on blog design from the perspectives of social influence and interactions. Examining design patterns from five networks of blogs using content analysis method, the results show that design of blogs in an online network shares similar elements and the pattern is different from one network to the other

When resources collide: Towards a theory of coincidence in information spaces

This paper is an attempt to lay out foundations for a general theory of coincidence in information spaces such as the World Wide Web, expanding on existing work on bursty structures in document streams and information cascades. We elaborate on the hypothesis that every resource that is published in an information space, enters a temporary interaction with another resource once a unique explicit or implicit reference between the two is found. This thought is motivated by Erwin Shroedingers notion of entanglement between quantum systems. We present a generic information cascade model that exploits only the temporal order of information sharing activities, combined with inherent properties of the shared information resources. The approach was applied to data from the world's largest online citizen science platform Zooniverse and we report about findings of this case study

From coincidence to purposeful flow? properties of transcendental information cascades

In this paper, we investigate a method for constructing cascades of information co-occurrence, which is suitable to trace emergent structures in information in scenarios where rich contextual features are unavailable. Our method relies only on the temporal order of content-sharing activities, and intrinsic properties of the shared content itself. We apply this method to analyse information dissemination patterns across the active online citizen science project Planet Hunters, a part of the Zooniverse platform. Our results lend insight into both structural and informational properties of different types of identifiers that can be used and combined to construct cascades. In particular, significant differences are found in the structural properties of information cascades when hashtags as used as cascade identifiers, compared with other content features. We also explain apparent local information losses in cascades in terms of information obsolescence and cascade divergence; e.g., when a cascade branches into multiple, divergent cascades with combined capacity equal to the original

A social network approach to examine K-12 educational leaders’ influence on information diffusion on Twitter

This study investigated the relationship between the leader’s gender, leadership position, Twitter use, and influence on information diffusion in the communication network on Twitter. We collected the 30,200 latest tweets of 151 active Twitter users who held educational leadership positions. Results of social network analysis and multiple regression analyses suggest a gender inequality in the leader’s influence on information diffusion in the network. Findings also indicate no significant relationship between leadership position (district vs. building) and a leader\u27s influence in the network. Moreover, Twitter following was positively associated with the leader’s influence in the network, whereas the number of followers, weekly tweets, and the time of Twitter account creation did not predict the leader’s influence. Practical implications on how leaders use Twitter to disseminate information are discussed

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