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.
The rise of blogs among online social media has been discussed from a sociological point of view in numerous papers, e.g., @cite_8 give some insights about bloggers demographics and cultural behaviors; in @cite_29 , the author describes their influence on society. Given the size and richness of the blog datasets, automatic classification and text-mining tools have been widely used to study the dynamics of trends and opinions in the blogosphere @cite_19 @cite_7 @cite_26 @cite_14 @cite_28 . For example, some studies concentrate on the political blogosphere to understand the ties between political parties, in particular the way information spreads from a group to another @cite_18 @cite_22 . The question of trends is closely related to the definition of authority, influence and trust in social networks @cite_29 @cite_22 . As such, these text-mining tools are also used for various practical purposes as online advertising @cite_5 or search engines, ranking blogs according to their spreading ability @cite_2 .
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_29 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_5
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In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Specifically, we analyze the posts of 40 "A-list" blogs over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they discussed, both within the liberal and conservative communities, and also across communities. We also study a single day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot captures blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently found in sidebars), and presents a more static picture of a broader blogosphere. Most significantly, we find differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern. 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. Beyond serving as online diaries, weblogs have evolved into a complex social structure, one which is in many ways ideal for the study of the propagation of information. As weblog authors discover and republish information, we are able to use the existing link structure of blogspace to track its flow. Where the path by which it spreads is ambiguous, we utilize a novel inference scheme that takes advantage of data describing historical, repeating patterns of "infection." Our paper describes this technique as well as a visualization system that allows for the graphical tracking of information flow. The last decade has seen an explosion in blogging and the blogosphere is continuing to grow, having a large global reach and many vibrant communities. Researchers have been pouring over blog data with the goal of finding communities, tracking what people are saying, finding influencers, and using many social network analytic tools to analyze the underlying social networks embedded within the blogosphere. One of the key technical problems with analyzing large social networks such as those embedded in the blogosphere is that there are many links between individuals and we often do not know the context or meaning of those links. This is problematic because it makes it difficult if not impossible to tease out the true communities, their behavior, how information flows, and who the central players are (if any). This paper seeks to further our understanding of how to analyze large blog networks and what they can tell us. We analyze 1.13M blogs posted by 185K bloggers over a period of 3 weeks. These bloggers span private blog sites through large blog-sites such as LiveJournal and Blogger. We show that we can, in fact, tag links in meaningful ways by leveraging topic-detection over the blogs themselves. We use these topics to contextually tag links coming from a particular blog post. This enrichment enables us to create smaller topic-specific graphs which we can analyze in some depth. We show that these topic-specific graphs not only have a different topology from the general blog graph but also enable us to find central bloggers which were otherwise hard to find. We further show that a temporal analysis identifies behaviors in terms of how components form as well as how bloggers continue to link after components form. These behaviors come to light when doing an analysis on the topic-specific graphs but are hidden or not easily discernable when analyzing the general blog graph. We study the dynamics of information propagation in environments of low-overhead personal publishing, using a large collection of WebLogs over time as our example domain. We characterize and model this collection at two levels. First, we present a macroscopic characterization of topic propagation through our corpus, formalizing the notion of long-running "chatter" topics consisting recursively of "spike" topics generated by outside world events, or more rarely, by resonances within the community. Second, we present a microscopic characterization of propagation from individual to individual, drawing on the theory of infectious diseases to model the flow. We propose, validate, and employ an algorithm to induce the underlying propagation network from a sequence of posts, and report on the results. Allowing global distribution of information to large audiences at very low cost, the Internet has emerged as a vital medium for marketing and advertising. Weblogs, a new form of self publication on the Internet, have attracted online advertisers because of their incredible growth-rate in recent years. In this paper, we propose to discover information diffusion paths from the blogosphere to track how information frequently flows from blog to blog. This knowledge can be used in various applications of online campaign. Our approach is based on analyzing the content of blogs. After detecting trackable topics of blogs, we model a blog community as a blog sequence database. Then, the discovery of information diffusion paths is formalized as a problem of frequent pattern mining. We develop a new data mining algorithm to discover information diffusion paths. Experiments conducted on real life dataset show that our algorithm discovers information diffusion paths efficiently. The discovered information diffusion paths are accurate in predicting the future information flow in the blog community.