Identifying Influential Bloggers: Time Does Matter

Abstract

Blogs have recently become one of the most favored services on the Web. Many users maintain a blog and write posts to express their opinion, experience and knowledge about a product, an event and every subject of general or specific interest. More users visit blogs to read these posts and comment them. This “participatory journalism” of blogs has such an impact upon the masses that Keller and Berry argued that through blogging “one American in tens tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat and what to buy” [9]. Therefore, a significant issue is how to identify such influential bloggers. This problem is very new and the relevant literature lacks sophisticated solutions, but most importantly these solutions have not taken into account temporal aspects for identifying influential bloggers, even though the time is the most critical aspect of the Blogosphere. This article investigates the issue of identifying influential bloggers by proposing two easily computed blogger ranking methods, which incorporate temporal aspects of the blogging activity. Each method is based on a specific metric to score the blogger’s posts. The first metric, termed MEIBI, takes into consideration the number of the blog post’s inlinks and its comments, along with the publication date of the post. The second metric, MEIBIX, is used to score a blog post according to the number and age of the blog post’s inlinks and its comments. These methods are evaluated against the state-of-the-art influential blogger identification method utilizing data collected from a real-world community blog site. The obtained results attest that the new methods are able to better identify significant temporal patterns in the blogging behaviour