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