A data-driven analysis to question epidemic models for citation cascades on the blogosphere

Citation cascades in blog networks are often considered as traces of information spreading on this social medium. In this work, we question this point of view using both a structural and semantic analysis of five months activity of the most representative blogs of the french-speaking community.Statistical measures reveal that our dataset shares many features with those that can be found in the literature, suggesting the existence of an identical underlying process. However, a closer analysis of the post content indicates that the popular epidemic-like descriptions of cascades are misleading in this context.A basic model, taking only into account the behavior of bloggers and their restricted social network, accounts for several important statistical features of the data.These arguments support the idea that citations primary goal may not be information spreading on the blogosphere.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures, to be published in ICWSM-13 proceeding

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

An overview on user profiling in online social networks

Advances in Online Social Networks is creating huge data day in and out providing lot of opportunities to its users to express their interest and opinion. Due to the popularity and exposure of social networks, many intruders are using this platform for illegal purposes. Identifying such users is challenging and requires digging huge knowledge out of the data being flown in the social media. This work gives an insight to profile users in online social networks. User Profiles are established based on the behavioral patterns, correlations and activities of the user analyzed from the aggregated data using techniques like clustering, behavioral analysis, content analysis and face detection. Depending on application and purpose, the mechanism used in profiling users varies. Further study on other mechanisms used in profiling users is under the scope of future endeavors

The Influencer Industry: Constructing And Commodifying Authenticity On Social Media

The most buzzed-about figure in twenty-first century marketing thus far has been the “digital influencer,” industry vernacular for the bloggers, Instagrammers, Pinners, and other social media users who—against the backdrop of widespread economic and professional instability—deliver curated content to audiences on social media and earn income by collaborating with major brands. Driving the rise of this phenomenon have been (1) individuals who want to be recognized as persuasive online (2) advertisers who increasingly direct their budgets to social media, where influencers’ “authentic,” personality-inflected content has proven potent for selling product (3) social media companies whose tools and rules both advance and encumber these activities and (4) marketing agencies and other marketing-related entities, such as talent agencies and trend forecasters, that build metrics platforms to measure influence, select influencers for advertising campaigns, negotiate deals between influencers and retail brands, and espouse the many benefits of expressing oneself “authentically” online in tandem with corporate sponsors. The precipitous development of an industry around these activities has, since the late 2000s, propelled billions of dollars into the social media economy and helped instigate a chain of events that have and continue to fundamentally change the production of culture. Drawing on 28 in-depth interviews, an analysis of more than 2000 press articles, and participant observation at industry events, this dissertation examines how the above stakeholders construct and negotiate the meaning, value, and practical use of digital influence as they reimagine it as a commodity for the social media age—a commodity whose value shifts in accordance with ever-changing industrial rubrics for cultivating and evaluating authenticity. The dissertation also provides necessary historical-cultural context to the rise of the influencer industry, elucidating its complex roots that predate the digital era. Throughout, I show how in an era where authenticity is increasingly elusive, and trust’s and influence’s meanings as cultural ideals and functions as social processes are muddied, the influencer industry struggles to pin these concepts down, stabilize and define them, and make money off of these definitions. To this end, the actors involved in the influencer system work together in a variety of ways both intentional and unintentional, with social, industrial, and cultural consequences. These consequences include who can succeed, the shape of technological innovation and regulation, and products themselves. The study offers theoretical and methodological provocations to scholars of influence and authenticity to consider these concepts’ industrially constructed, contextually dependent nature. It also sheds light on practical issues impacted by social- and data-driven consumerism

P Deepa Shenoy and Venugopal KR,“PTMIB: Profiling Top Most Influential Blogger using Content Based Data Mining Approach,”

Users of Online Social Network (OSN) communicate with each other, exchange information and spread rapidly influencing others in the network for taking various decisions. Blog sites allow their users to create and publish thoughts on various topics of their interest in the form of blogs/blog documents, catching the attention and letting readers to perform various activities on them. Based on the content of the blog documents posted by the user, they become popular. In this work, a novel method to profile Top Most Influential Blogger (TMIB) is proposed based on content analysis. Content of blog documents of bloggers under consideration in the blog network are compared and analyzed. Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) of blog documents under consideration are obtained and their Cosine Similarity score is computed. Synonyms are substituted against those unmatched keywords if the Cosine Similarity score so computed is below the threshold and an improved Cosine Similarity score of those documents under consideration is obtained. Computing the Influence Score after Synonym substitution (ISaS) of those bloggers under conflict, the top most influential blogger is profiled. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed Profiling Top Most Influential Blogger using Synonym Substitution (PTMIBSS) algorithm is adequately accurate in determining the top most influential blogger at any instant of time considered

Trust beyond reputation: A computational trust model based on stereotypes

Models of computational trust support users in taking decisions. They are commonly used to guide users' judgements in online auction sites; or to determine quality of contributions in Web 2.0 sites. However, most existing systems require historical information about the past behavior of the specific agent being judged. In contrast, in real life, to anticipate and to predict a stranger's actions in absence of the knowledge of such behavioral history, we often use our "instinct"- essentially stereotypes developed from our past interactions with other "similar" persons. In this paper, we propose StereoTrust, a computational trust model inspired by stereotypes as used in real-life. A stereotype contains certain features of agents and an expected outcome of the transaction. When facing a stranger, an agent derives its trust by aggregating stereotypes matching the stranger's profile. Since stereotypes are formed locally, recommendations stem from the trustor's own personal experiences and perspective. Historical behavioral information, when available, can be used to refine the analysis. According to our experiments using Epinions.com dataset, StereoTrust compares favorably with existing trust models that use different kinds of information and more complete historical information

Curating a Consumption Ideology: Platformization and Gun Influencers on Instagram

This study explores how a platform enables social media influencers to promulgate a consumption ideology. We show how gun influencers, or “gunfluencers,” use Instagram to link products, activities, and meanings to Second Amendment ideology – a gun-centric belief system in the United States colloquially known as “2A ideology.” Through a qualitative study of 25 Instagram gunfluencers, we identify a process of curating a consumption ideology wherein social media influencers employ four curatorial tactics: glamourizing, demystifying, victimizing, and tribalizing. Findings suggest gunfluencers extend audiences and leverage algorithms to prescribe and model how supporters of 2A ideology should look, act, speak, feel, and consume. Our research contributes to understanding how consumption ideologies are promulgated in a digital, platformized world. In the context of U.S. gun culture, implications address the role of platformization in supporting gun companies’ promotional efforts, despite government- and platform-based restrictions, and the political dimensions of influencer and consumer cultures

Business and social changes from the blog

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-100).Back in 2003, Blogs as well as wikis started the Web 2.0 frenzy with online community networks and user generated content. Web 2.0 has recently cooled down, but it may have started a new era. The purpose of this paper is to explore the blogonomics - the business, as well as social, changes blogs have brought to us. It applies system thinking to analyze blogs, from blog elements (forms) to blog systems, and then to major components in the blog ecosystem. This paper focuses on the returns on blogs (ROB), mainly the business impact. Blog marketing, including word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) and blog ads, has been discussed extensively along with the business models that can monetize blogs. It also proposes to use blogs as innovative tools for collaboration and content management. This paper primarily targets companies interested in the benefit from blogs. Furthermore, it hopes to explore a few innovative blog business models for entrepreneurs and serve anyone who is genuinely interested in blogs and Web 2.0.by Ching Q. Guo.S.M