Information Diffusion through Blogspace [pdf]

Daniel Gruhl, R. Guha, David Liben-Nowell, Andrew Tomkins

SIGKDD Explorations, 6(2):43--52, December 2004, special issue on web-content mining.
Previously in Proceedings of WWW'04.

We study the dynamics of information propagation in environments of low-overhead personal publishing, using a large collection of weblogs over time as our example domain. We characterize and model this collection at two levels. First, we present a macroscopic characterization of topic propagation through our corpus, formalizing the notion of long-running "chatter" topics consisting recursively of "spike" topics generated by outside world events, or more rarely, by resonances within the community. Second, we present a microscopic characterization of propagation from individual to individual, drawing on the theory of infectious diseases to model the flow. We propose, validate, and employ an algorithm to induce the underlying propagation network from a sequence of posts, and report on the results.

@Article{gglnt:kddexplorations2004,
  author =       {Daniel Gruhl
                  and R. V. Guha
                  and David Liben-Nowell
                  and Andrew Tomkins},
  title =        {Information Diffusion through Blogspace},
  journal =      {SIGKDD Explorations},
  year =         2004,
  volume =       6,
  number =       2,
  pages =        {43--52},
  month =        dec,
}

David Liben-Nowell

5 April 2004