Network analysis of an online community

Abstract

We empirically study various network properties of an online community. The numbers of articles written by each user to the bulletin boards of each of the others are used to construct the directed and weighted network B, and gifting behaviors among users are also kept track of, to build the network G which is again directed and weighted. Detailed analysis reveals that B and G have very different network properties. In particular, whereas B contains many more bidirectional links than directed arcs, G shows the opposite characteristic. The number of writings on bulletin boards is found to decay with the distance from the hub vertex, which reflects the structural assortativeness in B. We also observe that the activities in writings and purchases are negatively correlated with each other for highly active users in B. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.