A Framework for Modeling Influence, Opinions and Structure in Social Media

The Blogosphere provides an interesting opportunity to study social interactions. Blogs provide a channel to express opinions, facts and thoughts. Through these pieces of information, also known as memes, bloggers influence each other and engage in conversations that ultimately lead to exchange of ideas and spread of information. We aim to characterize and model the Blogosphere to study the spread of influence, opinion formation and social interaction. Further, we propose a simple generative process that models creation and evolution of blogs. This model is an extension of existing preferential attachment and random surfer model. Using available samples of the Blogosphre (represented as a blog graph) and the proposed generative model, we hypothesize, compare and validate different approaches to modeling influence and opinion formation in social media.