Information Diffusion Through Blogspace

Abstract

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.

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