Analysis of User Relations and Reading Activity in Weblogs (summary)

Blog has been attracting attention in recently. All operations accompanying the presentation of information can be performed easily on the Web, so the users update content frequently. Commenting and trackback is the functions of blogs. By the trackback functions, two-way communications can be realized in order to continue a discussion by passing “linked” information at the server, so that reverse links can be formed from the destination blog to the originating blog. Beside the blogger updates his own blog, he or she also visits and reads other blogs, writes comment, and creates links and trackbacks. The activities of the blogger give a basis for recognizing relationships. Blogs are now often combined with social networking services. The paper focuses on the relationships among blogs and analyzes how great an effect blog relationships have on the reading behavior of the user. It is examined whether there is a correlation indicating that users often visit blogs with strong relationship (based on factors such as comments and trackbacks). And analyze whether blogs that are read frequently by the users can be identified from blog relationships. The purpose is to determine the actual state of utilization by users.

A Short Walk in the Blogistan (summary)

Blog has grown rapidly in the last two years as a new communication mechanism between afi cionados who appear to avidly follow the opinions, stories, and observations. Blogs in practice have turned out to be writings aobut a variety of topics, typically updated on a much more regular basis than homepages. Blogs are basically large queues with additions appearing at the top of the page and older material scrolling down. The key differences between ordinary Web pages and a blog is the constant updating of content as well as links to other sites that are themselves changing. This paper explore how emerging interests and patterns can be extrated by tracking a seed collection of blogs that have been modified fairly recently. They develop a methodology to identify emerging patterns on general data sets that comprise evolving communication networks. And examine the size and nature of the blogistan (describe the collection of blogs) based on a recent collection of blogs. They also present a collection of inferences and observations based on our study on identifying blogs, the growing spam problem in blogs, and how blog sites are accessed.

Empirical analysis of online social networks in the age of Web 2.0 (summary)

The development of social collaborative technologies, such as blogs, Wiki, and social networking sites (SNS), result in an extraordinarily fast growing online virtual community. The concept of Web 2.0 is very popular. In blogsphere and SNS, users can conviniently create and joinn communities or groups who share the same interests and activities. Blogging networks and SNS can be viewed as representative online social networks in the age of Web 2.0. The paper focus on two Chinese online social networks, Sina blogs and Xiaonei SNS. Both the networks have small-world and scale-free features already observed in real-world and artificial networks. More of the observation about the correlation between degree (in/out) and degree (in/out), clustering coefficient and degree, popularity (in terms of number of page views) and in-degree (for the blogging network). Also about the blogging network is a disassortative mixing pattern in general and the Xiaonei network as an assortative one. The top two realistic networks obtained in the study, simulations of dynamic processes can be integrated to invenstigate spreading process (information, gossip), evolution of cooperation, etc.