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The spread of media content through blogs

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Abstract

Blogs are a popular way to share personal journals, discuss matters of public opinion, pursue collaborative conversations, and aggregate content on similar topics. Blogs can be also used to disseminate new content and novel ideas to communities of interest. In this paper, we present an analysis of the topological structure and the patterns of popular media content that is shared in blogs. By analyzing 8.7 million posts of 1.1 million blogs across 15 major blog hosting sites, we find that the network structure of blogs is “less social” compared to other online social networks: most links are unidirectional and the network is sparsely connected. The type of content that was popularly shared on blogs was surprisingly different from that from the mainstream media: user generated content, often in the form of videos or photos, was the most common type of content disseminated in blogs. The user-generated content showed interesting viral-spreading patterns within blogs. Topical content such as news and political commentary spreads quickly by the hour and then quickly disappears, while non-topical content such as music and entertainment propagates slowly over a much long period of time.

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Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. While over the recent years microblogging services like Twitter has become extremely popular, the traditional form of blogs still has a much larger number of users. Hence, we mention that it is equally important to study the blogging conventions as well as those in the newer microblogs. See our discussion in Related Work.

  2. The density measure could be also defined under directed graph (Scott 2000), whose results are very similar to that in the undirected graph. We use the concept in undirected graph, in order to compare the results with that of other (undirected) social networks like Facebook.

  3. http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html.

  4. http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines.

  5. In this data set we are unable to verify if the videos were discovered independently by a user, or were shared as a result of a recommendation by another blogger.

  6. http://www.tvguide.com/special/best-of-year-2008/photogallery/headlines-1000425.

  7. http://www.faqs.org/shareranks/2361,Hottest-Headlines-of-2008.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea

    Meeyoung Cha

  2. Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany

    Juan Antonio Navarro Pérez

  3. Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK

    Hamed Haddadi

Authors
  1. Meeyoung Cha
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  2. Juan Antonio Navarro Pérez
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  3. Hamed Haddadi
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Correspondence to Hamed Haddadi.

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Cha, M., Pérez, J.A.N. & Haddadi, H. The spread of media content through blogs. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 2, 249–264 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-011-0040-x

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