A Random Walk Approach to Modeling the Dynamics of the Blogosphere

Part 6: Network ScienceInternational audienceIt is important to develop intuitive and tractable generative models to simulate the topological and temporal dynamics of the blogosphere because these models provide insights about its structural evolution. In such generative models, independent instances of individual bloggers are initiated and these instances interact with each other to simulate the evolution of the blogosphere. Existing generative models of the blogosphere have certain limitations: (1) they do not simultaneously consider the topological and temporal properties, or (2) they utilize the global information about the blogosphere that is typically not available. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model for the blogosphere based on the random walk process that simultaneously considers both the topological and temporal properties and does not utilize the global information about the blogosphere. The results of our experiments show that the proposed random walk based model successfully captures the scale-free nature of both topological and temporal dynamics of the blogosphere