Predicting through writing style the impact of blog posts in online communities

Nowadays blogging has become one of the most common and frequently employed methods for creating communities around specific topics of interest. This phenomenon is due to the existence of numerous online platforms that enable the creation with ease of blogs even for non-technical users. However, finding relevant blogs is a difficult and time-consuming process. This paper focuses on predicting whether a post has an impact or not based only on its writing style and automatically inferred textual complexity indices. We define the impact of a post as the traction it receives from other users in terms of number of received comments. Thus, several blogs were crawled on which a set of textual complexity indices available from the ReaderBench framework were computed. By splitting the posts in two categories, we were able to predict with an accuracy of 69.7% whether a post will receive comments or not.