Social Capital in Online Communities

From DML

People are connecting online with those they are friends with and those that they share affinities, or inherent similarities, thus, forming online communities. The social capital that exists within these communities is just beginning to be explored and understood. We explore these connections by creating an effective mathematical formulation of social capital and use it on recent blog entry data. Our current study is on a dynamic segment of the Blogosphere. Future work, will include studies on patient communities within the Medical domain.

[edit] Blogosphere Study

The Blogosphere refers to the growing social network among people that write blogs, or web logs. We explore the social capital found in these networks of bloggers. Little work has been done with regards to implicit relationships between bloggers. We are creating a blog entry database for analysis of both implicit and explicit networks within the blogosphere.

• BlogGrabber is the python package available for download that we created to extract large amounts of blog feeds.
• The Blog Database Creation Process details of how the enormous amount of blog data has been obtained for use in these studies.

[edit] Building Community around a Blog

The Blogosphere, or the social network of people that read and write blogs, has become an important network to participate in. Blogs, short for weblogs, are created by businesses and ordinary people to achieve goals like informing customers of new products, giving expert knowledge on a particular topic, or sharing life events with family and friends; blogs can communicate information that people wish to share. There has been plenty of ideas about how to build community around a blog, which has resulted in anecdotal evidence that would surely benefit from additional testing. The focus of this project has been on testing these ideas in order to show their effectiveness. The initial results provide further guidance to building community around a blog.

• DML Blog - the Data Mining Lab blog was started to (1) share the interesting work we are involved in, and (2) test anecdotal theories of how to build community around a blog
• DML Blog Log (Google Doc) - the schedule of actions that have been taken on the DML blog
• SRC Presentation - Slides reporting on the first seven weeks of the the Data Mining Lab blog (presented at the 2008 Spring Research Conference)

[edit] Our Publications

Smith, M., Purser, N., and Giraud-Carrier, C. (2008). Social Capital in the Blogosphere: A Case Study. To appear in AAAI Technical Notes.

Smith, M., Giraud-Carrier, C. and Judkins, B. (2007). Implicit Affinity Networks. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems, 1-6.

Smith, M. (2007). Implicit Affinity Networks. Brigham Young University.