Identifying the Influentials in Blogosphere

Blogging becomes a popular way for a Web user to publish information on the Web. Bloggers write blog posts, share their likes and dislikes, voice their opinions, provide suggestions, report news, and form groups in Blogosphere. As its size doubled for every 6 months, Blogosphere is expanding with about 175,500 daily blogs. Bloggers form their virtual communities of similar interests. Activities happened in Blogosphere affect the external world in many ways. The conventional journalism now looks more into this form of participatory journalism for events of special interests, and collective wisdoms are tapped for unique deals and great opportunities. In order to track and understand the development on Blogosphere, in the past, researchers have focused on finding influential blog sites. Regardless of a blog site being influential or not, inspired by the high impact of the influentials in a physical community, we endeavor to identify the influential bloggers in a virtual community (a blog site). There are many non-influential blog sites (“the long tail”) and they can still have their influential bloggers. Active bloggers are not necessarily influential ones. There may be more than one influential blogger at one site given the nature of Blogosphere. Influential bloggers can impact other fellow bloggers in various ways. In this paper, recognizing the challenges of identifying influential bloggers, we investigate what constitutes influential bloggers, present a preliminary model to quantify an influential blogger to pave the way for a robust model that allows for finding various types of the influentials. To illustrate these issues, we conduct experiments with data from a real blog site, evaluate many aspects of identifying influential bloggers, and discuss unique challenges. We conclude with interesting findings and future work.