Abstract

Online social media has emerged as a critical factor in information dissemination, search, marketing, expertise and influence discovery, and potentially an important tool for mobilizing people. It has also given researchers access to massive quantities of social data for empirical analysis. These data sets offer a rich source of evidence for studying dynamics of individual and group behavior, the structure of networks and global patterns of the flow of information on them. However, in most previous studies, the structure of the underlying networks was not directly visible but had to be inferred from the flow of information from one individual to another. As a result, we do not yet understand dynamics of information spread on networks or how the structure of the network affects it. We analyze data from two popular social news sites, Digg and Twitter, to understand the mechanisms of information diffusion in social …

Date

November 20, 2013

Authors

Kristina Lerman

Book

Handbook of Human Computation

Pages

751-759

Publisher

Springer New York