Communities Are Formed Around Blogosphere Opinion Leaders [Preprint Article]

A preprint of an article by Olesya Koltsova, Sergey Koltsov and Sergey Nikolenko, fellows of the Laboratory for Internet Studies (LINIS), was published on the Higher School of Economics official website.

A preprint of an article by Olesya Koltsova, Sergey Koltsov and Sergey Nikolenko, fellows of the Laboratory for Internet Studies (LINIS), was published on the Higher School of Economics official website.

By analyzing networks of mutual commenting, researchers have found hidden associations forming around important social issues. The results showed that in the Russian blogosphere discussions often focus more on the bloggers themselves as opinion leaders than on the things they write about.

The researchers reached their conclusions by analyzing 17,386 posts by the most popular Live Journal bloggers (2K authors) and more than 520K comments that form a network with nearly 4.5m edges. This is the first study of communities of mutual commenting that tries to establish the basis for their occurrence.