Do ordinary bloggers really differ from blog celebrities?

Abstract

In this paper we describe structural and topical properties of "ordinary" blogs versus "popular" blogs. Using the complete directory of the Russian language LiveJournal, we sample both groups and show that the main difference between them is in the volume of posting activity and of commenting feedback and in the skewedness of respective distributions. No substantial differences in topical structure obtained with the LDA algorithm are found, which suggests that ordinary bloggers do not hold specific vision of topic salience and do not set their own "grassroots" agendas.