Identifying the Productive and Influential Bloggers in a Community

Social networking has become one of the most important trends on the Web, leading to the development of several social applications such as blogs. Blogs are locations on the Web where individuals are provided with the ability to express their opinion, experience, and knowledge about a product, an event, or any other subject. The tremendous popularity of these services has rendered the problem of identifying the most influential bloggers significant, since its solution can lead to numerous major benefits for commerce, advertising, and searching. The current works on this topic either ignore temporal aspects or they fail to gracefully incorporate recency, productivity, and influence at the same time. This paper investigates the issue of identifying bloggers who are both productive and influential by introducing the blogger's productivity index and blogger's influence index. The proposed metrics are evaluated against the state-of-the-art influential blogger identification methods by employing data collected from a real-world community blog site. The obtained results confirm that the new methods are able to identify significant patterns in the bloggers' behavior.