Blog cascade affinity: analysis and prediction

Information propagation within the blogosphere is of much importance in implementing policies, marketing research, launching new products, and other applications. In this paper, we take a microscopic view of the information propagation pattern in blogosphere by investigating blog cascade affinity. A blog cascade is a group of posts linked together discussing about the same topic, and cascade affnity refers to the phenomenon of a blog's inclination to join a specific cascade. We identify and analyze an array of features that may affect a blogger's cascade joining behavior and utilize these features to predict cascade affinity of blogs. Evaluated on a real dataset consisting of 873,496 posts, our svm-based prediction achieved accuracy of 0.723 measured by F1. Our experiments also showed that among all features identified, the number of friends was the most important factor affecting bloggers' inclination to join cascades.