Co-Evolution of Friendship and Publishing in Online Blogging Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how blogging and social activities co-evolve in online blogging social networks, revealing that most users are passive readers, with publishing being the dominant activity and socializing complementing blogging.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the interplay between publishing and social activities in BSNs, identifying user archetypes and demonstrating the positive correlation between these behaviors.

Findings

Most users are passive readers.

Publishing dominates active behaviors.

Social activities complement blogging.

Abstract

In the past decade, blogging web sites have become more sophisticated and influential than ever. Much of this sophistication and influence follows from their network organization. Blogging social networks (BSNs) allow individual bloggers to form contact lists, subscribe to other blogs, comment on blog posts, declare interests, and participate in collective blogs. Thus, a BSN is a bimodal venue, where users can engage in publishing (post) as well as in social (make friends) activities. In this paper, we study the co-evolution of both activities. We observed a significant positive correlation between blogging and socializing. In addition, we identified a number of user archetypes that correspond to "mainly bloggers," "mainly socializers," etc. We analyzed a BSN at the level of individual posts and changes in contact lists and at the level of trajectories in the friendship-publishing space. Both approaches produced consistent results: the majority of BSN users are passive readers; publishing is the dominant active behavior in a BSN; and social activities complement blogging, rather than compete with it.