Modeling the Spread of Influence on the Blogosphere

Blogs have become a means by which new ideas and information spreads rapidly on the web. They often discuss the latest trends and echo with reactions on different events in the world. The collective wisdom present on the blogosphere is invaluable for market researchers and companies launching new products. In this paper, we validate the effectiveness of some of the influence models on the blogosphere. We validate the robustness of different heuristics in presence of splogs or spam blogs on the web. Experiments also show how PageRank based heuristics could be used to select an influential set of bloggers such that we could maximize the spread of information on the blogosphere.

See this paper for background.