Homework 5-3-2008

Paper 12-Empirical analysis of online social networks in the age of Web 2.0

In this paper, they present empirical analysis of statistical properties of two important Chinese online social networks, namely, Sina blogs and Xiaonei SNS—a blogging network and an SNS open to college students, and they investigate the distribution of topological distance. The former is the largest Chinese blog space provider and has more than 2 million registered users in the mainland of China. The latter is the largest and most popular social networking service provider in China.
It is found that both the networks have small-world and scale-free features already observed in real-world and artificial networks. Further, the correlations between degree (in/out) and degree (in/out), clustering coefficient and degree, popularity (in terms of number of page views) and i-degree (for the blogging network), etc. are examined. It is also shown that the blogging network is a disassortative one, whereas the Xiaonei network and assortative one.

Paper 13-A short walk in the Blogistan

In this paper, they show how to identify emerging interests and argued that in contrast to traditional search, this mandates not only large scope analysis of referenced links but also of their evolution over time. Their multi-hop crawl has presented a reasonable approximation of the connected portion of the blogistan along with several of its interesting attributes such as the number unique domains that host blogs and the relatively low number of IP addresses.
They said an important contribution of their work is the methodology they developed to identify emerging interests by mining hyperlinks in blogs and their change over time. The methodology constitutes a general approach to mine evolving interconnection networks that they believe can have applications well beyond the Blogistan.

Paper 14-Analysis of User Relations and Reading Activity in Weblogs

In this study, they analyze which pages the users in a blog network read most frequently from the viewpoint of the relationship among blogs, and interpret the result. This paper focuses on the relationships among blogs and analyzes how great an effect blog relationships have on the reading behavior of the user. In this paper, they investigate the database of Doblog, an existing blog hosting service. Since users of this service write blogs or comments after logging in, the data on the reading behavior of the users can be acquired. The range of 2-hop connection from a blog is considered, and an attempt is made, by using the index, to reveal the reading behavior of users, such as strength and kind, on the basis of the number of routes. It is evident that bookmarks have a strong effect, and that users circulate around the bookmarks in a blog network.