Social Capital in the Blogosphere: A Case Study

Online communities are forming in the Blogosphere as people connect online with friends and those they have affinities, or inherent similarities with. We explore the social capital that exists within these communities by deriving an effective mathematical formulation of social capital based on implicit and explicit connections. We illustrate these concepts by conducting a case study on an active segment of the Blogosphere. We focus our discussion on only blogs that have significant relationships among each other. Topics are generated using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to form an implicit affinity network (IAN) that highlights potential sub-communities that would result through increased bonding.