Analysis of Bloggers' Influence Style within Blog

Abstract

Blogs are readily available sources of opinions and sentiments which allows bloggers to exert a certain level of influence over the blog readers. Previous studies had attempted to analyze blog features to detect influence within the blogosphere, but had not studied in details influence at the blogger-level. Other studies studied bloggers' personalities with regards to their propensity to blog, but did not relate the personalities of bloggers to influence. Bloggers may differ in their way or manner of exerting influence. For example, bloggers could be active participants or just passive shares, or whether they express ideas in a rational or subjective manner, or they are received positively or negatively by the readers. In this paper, we further analyze the engagement style (frequency, scope, originality, and consistency of the blog postings), persuasion style (appeals to reasons or emotions), and persona (degree of compliance) of individual bloggers. Methods used include similarity analysis to detect the sharing-creating aspect of engagement style, subjectivity analysis to measure persuasion style, and sentiment analysis to identify persona style. While previous studies analyzed influence at blog site level, our model is shown to provide a fine-grained influence analysis that could further differentiate the bloggers' influence style in a blog site.