Identifying topic experts and topic communities in the blogspace

Abstract

Blogs have become an important media of self-expression recently. Millions of people write blog posts, share their interests, give suggestions and form groups in blogspace. An important way to understand the development of blogspace is to identify topic experts as well as blog communities and to further find how they interact with each other. Topic experts are influential bloggers who usually publish "authoritative" opinions on a specific topic and influence their followers. Here we first discuss the challenge of efficient identifying topic experts and then propose a novel model to quantify topic experts. Based on the topic experts identified, we further propose a new approach to identify the related blog communities on that topic. Experiments are conducted and the results demonstrate that our approaches are very effective and efficient. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.