Popular or Personal: Access Patterns of User Generated Content

It is generally believed that Zipf's law is well applied for Web objects. However, as OSNs prevail and Internet begins to concentrate more and more on individuals, many researchers report that request frequency of Web objects deviates from Zipf's law notably, especially for UGC (User Generated Content) sites. In this paper, we take the first step to explain it from the perspective of relations between content provider and consumer. Our contribution is twofold: (1) We propose a new metric named social locality to quantify relations between content providers and consumers of a site. (2) We find that social locality has strong influence on the access patterns of UGC sites. Sites with high social locality may deviate from Zipf's law more significantly than the ones with lower social locality.