Determining Diffusion Power Users in a Blogosphere

Abstract

As a result of the recent development in internet technology, social networks are also appearing in the online world. One representative example of online social networks is the world of blogs. In a blogosphere, a post, produced by a blogger can be disseminated to others through scrapping or linking activities. In this paper, this dissemination of information is called information diffusion, and the users who participated in diffusing the post are called 'assimilated' to the owner of the post. For business purposes, it is important; to identify diffusion power users, a group of users who have big influence on other users in diffusing contents. In this paper, we use the independent cascade model for determining diffusion power users, and to do so, we need a method for calculating the assimilation probability between users. This paper proposes the concepts of user content power and user delivery power and a way to quantifying the values of them. These values are used to compute the assimilation probability. We analyze the proposed method by comparing its performance with those of existing methods through extensive experiments using real-world blog data.