The following article takes a look at how information diffuses throughout blogs: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/990000/988739/p491-gruhl.pdf?key1=988739&key2=5402837711&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=20792120&CFTOKEN=30091602

There were two levels of analysis involved in this study. First they considered a topical approach: seeing how various world events and even local events affected spread topics throughout blogs. The researchers called this approach the “macroscopic” approach.

The second approach considered individuals inside the blogs and how they spread certain topics. This approach was called the “microscopic” approach.

One thing to note is that in class our discussion centered on people who come into physical contact with each other. The internet, however, makes the bottlenecks placed on the spread of topics and information much less. Today, many millions of people have weblogs, including members of various media outlets (such as CNN and FoxNews).

Under the macroscopic analysis, the researchers found that most topics on the web can be separated into three categories: just a spike (low activity to high activity, back to low activity), spiky chatter (multiple spikes throughout time; highly sensitive spikes), and mostly chatter (moderate activity but for a much longer time).

Spiky chatter would most likely be world events that impact a great deal of people. This could be something like ipods. Every time Apple makes an innovation in their ipod line, many bloggers post about what their hopes are for the product and how much they look forward to having one. Just a spike could be something like a superbowl (unless it’s a particularly good one). There will be many posts from analysts and fans as to whom they think will win. However, after the event is over, not many posts will be made.

Just chatter could be something which is an everyday occurrence, such as class sizes in schools.

Individuals were modeled differently from topics. Researchers modeled the spread of information through individuals as an infectious disease transferring through a society. This is a bit different from the way we modeled diffusion in networks in class. We had the diffusion stopping if a threshold number of neighbors who accepted the information was not made (like in class), information in a web based society can only be stopped if someone does not own a means to access the information.

Although an interesting article, studying the world wide web is difficult. The researchers in this article do a good job, but the internet is such a large domain that an accurate study of how information diffuses through blogspace warrants more study.