Finding Influential Bloggers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new efficient method for identifying influential bloggers based on comment relations, offering an alternative to link-based approaches and aiding applications like marketing and politics.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, comment-based influence measure for bloggers and compares its effectiveness with existing link-based methods like iFinder.

Findings

The new method effectively identifies influential bloggers.

Comparison shows competitive performance with link-based methods.

The approach is computationally efficient and scalable.

Abstract

Blogging is a popular way of expressing opinions and discussing topics. Bloggers demonstrate different levels of commitment and most interesting are influential bloggers. Around such bloggers, the groups are forming, which concentrate users sharing similar interests. Finding such bloggers is an important task and has many applications e.g. marketing, business, politics. Influential ones affect others which is related to the process of diffusion. However, there is no objective way to telling which blogger is more influential. Therefore, researchers take into consideration different criteria to assess bloggers (e.g. SNA centrality measures). In this paper we propose new, efficient method for influential bloggers discovery which is based on relation of commenting in blogger's thread and is defined on bloggers level. Next, we compare results with other, comparative method proposed by Agarwal et al. called iFinder which is based on links between posts.