Evaluating the Authority in a Weblog Community

Evaluando la Autoridad en una Comunidad Weblog

Carlos Alberto Ochoa Ortiz Zezzatti¹, José Alberto Hernández Aguilar², Sául González Campos¹, Arnulfo Castro Vázquez¹ and Julio Cesar Ponce Gallegos³

¹ Instituto de Ingeniería y Tecnología (Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica y Computación); UACJ, E–mails: megamax8@hotmail.com, jsaulg@prodigy.net.mx, arncastr@uacj.mx

² CIICAp, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, E–mail: jose_hernandez@uaem.mx

³ Laboratorio de Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, E–mail: julk_cpg@hotmail.com

Article received on October 31, 2007
Accepted on March 17, 2008

Abstract

The weblog medium while fundamentally is an innovation in personal publishing has also come to engender a new form of social interaction on the web: a massively distributed but completely connected conversation covering every imaginable topic of interest. A product of this ongoing communication is the set of hyperlinks made between weblogs in the exchange of dialog, a form of social acknowledgement on the part of authors. The purpose of this paper is to understand the social implications of linking in the community, drawing from the hyperlink citations collected by the Blogdex project over three years. Social network analysis is employed to describe the resulting social structure, and two measures of authority are explored: popularity, as measured by webloggers'public affiliations and influence measured by citation of each others writing. These metrics are evaluated with respect to each other and with the authority conferred by references in the popular press.

Keywords: Web log; social nets; social network analysis; permalink.

Resumen

El medio de la Weblog mientras que fundamentalmente es una innovación en la publicación personal ha también llevado a producir una nueva forma de interacción social en la Web: una conversación distribuida masivamente pero completamente conectada cubriendo cada tema imaginable de interés. Un producto de esta comunicación continua es el conjunto de hiperenlaces hechos entre weblogs en el intercambio de diálogos, una forma de reconocimiento social a los autores. El propósito de este documento es entender las implicaciones sociales de los enlaces en la comunidad, ilustrados por las citas de los hiperenlaces almacenadas en el proyecto Blogdex a lo largo de tres años. El análisis de redes sociales es utilizado para describir la estructura social resultante, y dos medidas de la autoridad son exploradas: la popularidad, medida por las afiliaciones públicas de los webloggers y la influencia medida por las citas en cada uno de los escritos de otros. Estas métricas son evaluadas una con respecto a la otra y con la autoridad conferida por los árbitros en la prensa popular.

Palabras clave: Weblog; redes sociales; análisis de una red social; permalink.

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