An interesting paper from some folks at HP's Information Dynamics Lab: Eytan Adar, Li Zhang, Lada Adamic & Rajan Lokose, "Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace." Here's the abstract:
Weblogs link together in a complex structure through which
new ideas and discourse can flow. Such a structure is ideal for
the study of the propagation of information. In this paper we
describe general categories of information epidemics and create
a tool to infer and visualize the paths specific infections take
through the network. This inference is based in part on a novel
utilization of data describing historical, repeating patterns of
infection. We conclude with a description of a new ranking
algorithm, iRank, for blogs. In contrast to traditional ranking
strategies, iRank acts on the implicit link structure to find those
blogs that initiate these epidemics.
And here's a cute picture. [link via email from Nick Montfort]
Posted by Mark Liberman at June 29, 2004 05:07 PM