Analysis of Roles and Groups in Blogosphere

Abstract

In the paper different roles of users in social media, taking into consideration their strength of influence and different degrees of cooperativeness, are introduced. Such identified roles are used for the analysis of characteristics of groups of strongly connected entities. The different classes of groups, considering the distribution of roles of users belonging to them, are presented and discussed.

Triad-Based Role Discovery for Large Social Systems

“…Golder et al also studied Usenet groups but proposed a different taxonomy of roles that include celebrity, ranter, lurker and troll [13]. Gliwa et al examined collections of online bloggers and defined roles such as selfish influential user, social influential blogger, and standard commentator [5]. Welser et al defined the roles substantive experts, technical editors, counter vandalism, and social networkers for Wikipedia users [14].…”

“…It also lets researchers perform comparative studies of different communities by comparing the structure of interactions among roles common to many contexts. Role analysis can also help us identify the kinds of roles (and hence users) that may become influential [5], and reveal latent social structures within social systems [6]. Furthermore, meta-analysis of the kinds of roles and the interactions among them can help designers create effective physical and digital spaces for communities and organizations to grow within [7].…”

On the discovery of social roles in large scale social systems

“…They sifted through conversations across different Usenet groups to study behaviors associated with each role. Gliwa et al examined collections of online bloggers and defined the roles selfish influential user, social influential user, selfish influential blogger, social influential blogger, influential commentator, standard commentator, not active, and standard blogger [40]. Welser et al defined four roles for Wikipedia users, namely substantive experts, technical editors, counter vandalism, and social networkers [92].…”

“…Social role analysis is also useful to identify the types of users that may become influential [40], and even reveal latent social structures within the systems [58].…”

“…It also enables meaningful studies of communities across time and context (e.g., different types corporate offices) by comparing the structure of interactions between roles that are common among them. For example, meta-analysis of the social roles roles and the interactions among them roles across different groups can help designers create effective physical and digital spaces for communities and organizations to grow within [44].Social role analysis is also useful to identify the types of users that may become influential [40], and even reveal latent social structures within the systems [58].This article presents a new method to discover the social roles that exist in large scale online social systems.The methodology is motivated by an analysis of the present art, which either: (i) requires an analyst to presume the existence of roles beforehand; and/or (ii) mines the roles using features about the users and the structure of the system that may not have a basis in social theory. The approach discovers social roles by clustering users by their conditional triad census, which is a vector capturing the types and orientations of three way relationships their ego-network is composed of.…”