Mining User Profiles to Support Structure and Explanation in Open Social Networking

TL;DR

This paper explores mining user profiles across social networks to uncover shared structures, enhancing content organization and explanation, demonstrated by significant improvements in blogroll similarity for music bloggers.

Contribution

It introduces methods for integrating social activities across sites to reveal hidden structures, improving content similarity and resource sharing.

Findings

Blogroll similarity improved by 85% using tracks.

Integration of tags increased similarity by 120%.

Demonstrates cross-site social activity benefits.

Abstract

The proliferation of media sharing and social networking websites has brought with it vast collections of site-specific user generated content. The result is a Social Networking Divide in which the concepts and structure common across different sites are hidden. The knowledge and structures from one social site are not adequately exploited to provide new information and resources to the same or different users in comparable social sites. For music bloggers, this latent structure, forces bloggers to select sub-optimal blogrolls. However, by integrating the social activities of music bloggers and listeners, we are able to overcome this limitation: improving the quality of the blogroll neighborhoods, in terms of similarity, by 85 percent when using tracks and by 120 percent when integrating tags from another site.