Finding the top influential bloggers based on productivity and popularity features

ABSTRACT A blog acts as a platform of virtual communication to share comments or views about products, events and social issues. Like other social web activities, blogging actions spread to a large number of people. Users influence others in many ways, such as buying a product, having a particular political or social opinion or initiating new activity. Finding the top influential bloggers is an active research domain as it helps us in various fields, such as online marketing, e-commerce, product search and e-advertisements. There exist various models to find the influential bloggers, but they consider limited features using non-modular approach. This paper proposes a new model, Popularity and Productivity Model (PPM), based on a modular approach to find the top influential bloggers. It consists of popularity and productivity modules which exploit various features. We discuss the role of each proposed and existing features and evaluate the proposed model against the standard baseline models using datasets from the real-world blogs. The analysis using standard performance evaluation measures verifies that both productivity and popularity modules play a vital role to find influential bloggers in blogging community in an effective manner.