• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.69-93
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• 2012

Various influence-related relationships in Social Network Services (SNS) among users, posts, and user-and-post, can be expressed using links. The current research evaluates the influence of specific users or posts by analyzing the link structure of relevant social network graphs to identify influential users. We applied the concept of mutual interactions proposed for ranking semantic web resources, rather than the voting notion of Page Rank or HITS, to blogosphere, one of the early SNS. Through many experiments with network models, where the performance and validity of each alternative approach can be analyzed, we showed the applicability and strengths of our approach. The weight tuning processes for the links of these network models enabled us to control the experiment errors form the link weight differences and compare the implementation easiness of alternatives. An additional example of how to enter the content scores of commercial or spam posts into the graph-based method is suggested on a small network model as well. This research, as a starting point of the study on identifying influential users in SNS, is distinctive from the previous researches in the following points. First, various influence-related properties that are deemed important but are disregarded, such as scraping, commenting, subscribing to RSS feeds, and trusting friends, can be considered simultaneously. Second, the framework reflects the general phenomenon where objects interacting with more influential objects increase their influence. Third, regarding the extent to which a bloggers causes other bloggers to act after him or her as the most important factor of influence, we treated sequential referencing relationships with a viewpoint from that of PageRank or HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Selection).