Determining Content Power Users in a Blog Network: An Approach and Its Applications

In a blog network, there are special users who induce other users to actively utilize blogs. Identifying such influential users is important when establishing business policy and business models for the blog network. This paper defines the users whose contents exhibit significant influence over other users as content power users (CPUs) and proposes a method of identifying them. We analyze the performance of the proposed method by applying it to an actual blog network and comparing its results with those of preexisting methods for determining power users. The experimental results demonstrate that the definition of CPUs is adequate to address the dynamic nature of the blogosphere and the main concerns of the blog industry. We also discuss the business models based on CPUs that could be used to stimulate user activities in a blog network.