More on measuring influence in the Blogosphere
Tim Finin, 1:00pm 20 December 2006As we’ve blogged before, we’re trying to come up with models of influence in the Blogosphere. We started with using Political Blogs as a starting point, with datasets courtsey Buzzmetrics and Lada Adamic. One of the tools we use is the polarity (sentiment) of the post to post links to infer the trust/influence/sentiment that should be reflected in a blog-blog link. Here is what our technique came up with for some “A list” political blogs .
|
From–To |
Num links |
Polarity before trust propagation |
Polarity after trust propagation |
|
MM-MM |
0 |
N/A |
+1.007 |
|
MM –DK |
0 |
N/A |
-9.290 |
|
MM–IP |
10 |
+1.000 |
+1.370 |
|
MM–AT |
0 |
N/A |
+3.530 |
|
DK–MM |
0 |
N/A |
-9.290 |
|
DK–DK |
0 |
N/A |
+8.570 |
|
DK–IP |
0 |
N/A |
+9.570 |
|
DK–AT |
20 |
-0.084 |
+3.260 |
|
IP–MM |
8 |
+1.000 |
+1.030 |
|
IP–DK |
6 |
+1.000 |
+9.570 |
|
IP–IP |
0 |
N/A |
+1.060 |
|
IP–AT |
0 |
N/A |
-3.640 |
|
AT–MM |
0 |
N/A |
+3.530 |
|
AT–DK |
5 |
0.342 |
+3.260 |
|
AT–IP |
0 |
N/A |
-3.640 |
|
AT–AT |
0 |
N/A |
+1.241 |
MM is Michelle Malkin, AT is Atrios (Eschaton), DK is DailyKos and IP is Instapundit. So looks like we got the sentiment polarity mostly right, even if in our original dataset (rather limited, admittedly) there were no direct links between two blogs. Of course the errors are obvious as well — Atrios trusts MichelleMalkin — that will be the day 
We’ve figured out why and are now tweaking the technique to fix such errors. Stay tuned for the detailed tech report ….
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