No blog is an Island - Analyzing connections across information networks

Abstract

There are multiple information and social networks among individuals, from telephone to email, web, blog, instant message (IM) and chat networks. Prior work has studied each of these individual networks quite extensively, including telephone networks [7], postal network [20], web communities [17], and so on. Still, what is of great interest is how these networks collide and interact with each other. Each individual has presence in multiple networks and it will be of interest to understand how the references and presence in one affects that in the others. Previously such studies would have been difficult to do since each source of data was often “owned ” by a specific entity. Blogs now provide a unique, public source of data that naturally provides visibility into multiple networks. For example, blog entries cite web pages, blogs have friends and community, as well as blog profiles that have links to email, IM and other networks. In this paper, we use the blogs as a starting point to pull in data about these multiple networks and study how these multiple networks interact with each other. While much of the connections are within specific networks, there is still a wealth of information, structure and form to the connections across these networks as our analyses show. 1.