Social influence and the diffusion of user-created content

Abstract

Social influence determines to a large extent what we adopt and when we adopt it. This is just as true in the digital domain as it is in real life, and has become of increasing importance due to the deluge of user-created content on the Internet. In this paper, we present an empirical study of user-to-user content transfer occurring in the context of a time-evolving social network in Second Life, a massively multiplayer virtual world.