International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

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March 26-28, 2007

Modeling Trust and Influence in the Blogosphere Using Link Polarity

Anubhav Kale, Amit Karandikar, Pranam Kolari, Akshay Java, Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi

There is a growing interest in social network analysis to explore how communities and individuals spread influence. We describe techniques to find "like minded" blogs based on blog-to-blog link sentiment for a particular domain. Using simple sentiment detection techniques, we identify the polarity (positive, negative or neutral) of the text surrounding links that point from one blog post to another. We use trust propagation models to spread this sentiment from a subset of connected blogs to other blogs and deduce like-minded blogs in the blog graph. Our techniques demonstrate the potential of using polar links for more generic problems such as detecting trustworthy nodes in web graphs.

Short Paper

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