Mood, Music and Friends: Mapping the Culture of LiveJournal

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Mood, Music and Friends Mapping the Culture of
LiveJournal

• INSNA Sunbelt ConferenceFebruary 17, 2005John
  C. Paolillo, Elijah Wright, Sarah Mercure and
  Peter Welsch

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Weblogs and Online Journals

• Weblog a regularly updated web page, with
  entries in reverse chronological order
• Facilitated by blogging software
• Hosted on many central sites
• Entries often have hyperlinks, especially to
  other weblogs
• Online journal and community blog sites
• blog.livedoor.com
• www.livejournal.com
• www.mypress.com
• www.deadjournal.com
• www.xanga.com
• yaplog.jp

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The Sample

• User profiles crawled over 5 days, March 2004
• Courtesy of Jim Ley

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Linkage/Clustering of Individuals

• Random sub-sample of 100 nodes in complete node
  set
• Followed foafknows links
• Counted the number of new nodes reached at each
  step

LiveJournal 102 834 8309 7482 891 14 0 0 0
Steps 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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Social Network Metadata

• Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) project
• Initiated by World-Wide Web Consortium
• Dan Brickley, Libby Miller, John Breslin, Stefan
  Decker, etc.
• 1997 to present
• A practical experiment
• Use semantic web to make (virtual) communities
  self-aware
• Target social networking applications
• People.link (plink.org), ecademy, Orkut, etc.

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Interests

• Incidence matrix
• 500 most common interests, 11K participants
• normalized (z-score)
• Principal components analysis
• 8 dimensions selected for interpretation
• Component scores for all participants
• Component loadings for all 500 interests
• Hierarchical cluster analysis
• on participants groups for SNA
• on interests for interpretation of social groups
• Cuts at 9 and 76 groups

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Interest Clusters

• Red General (intellectual pursuits)
• Orange Art
• Lt Green Nightlife
• Green Romance
• Cyan Sexuality
• Lt Blue Grunge music, piercing/tattoos
• Dk Blue Sci-fi fantasy comics
• Violet Music
• Magenta Goth/fetish

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Grunge Music Cluster Light Blue
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Sexuality Cyan
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Networks

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Interest Groups
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Interests Clusters and Groups
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The Core
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Examining the Core

• Size of groups varies from 20 to 400
• Randomly selected 225 blogs for content analysis
• gender, age, political orientation, subcultural
  groups, etc.
• No clear patterns emerge that explain
• group coherence (through friends)
• common interests

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Summary Observations

• Global organization of LiveJournal appears to be
  fairly loose
• Core and periphery generally characterizable
• NB we have only a small part of LiveJournal!
• Core groups appear to be associated with
  particular interests
• Shared interests of core users is not easily
  characterized
• Journal hosting sites may need to do more if
  their intent is to facilitate affiliation of
  like-minded people

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Remaining Issues

• Sampling issues
• The scale of the available data is very large
• Snowball sampling from the large site makes it
  unclear what piece of the network we get
• Additional random sampling points may improve
  this
• Ethics of large hosting sites
• Concentration of sociability of youthful users
• Users expose information that makes them socially
  and legally vulnerable through public profiles
• Dynamics
• We know very little about how the interests and
  friends relations change over time

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References

• Degenne, Alain and Michel Forse. 1999.
  Introducing Social Networks. Thousand Oaks,
  California Sage Publications.
• FOAF Vocabulary Specification. http//xmlns.com/fo
  af/0.1/ Accessed July 18, 2004.
• Granovetter, M. The strength of weak ties.
  American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380
  (1973).
• Forse, Michel. 1981. La sociabilite. Economie et
  Statistique 13239-48.
• Kling, Rob. What is Social Informatics and Why
  Does it Matter? D-Lib Magazine. Volume 5 Number 1
  (January 1999).
• Lavoie, Brian et al. Trends in the Evolution of
  the Public Web. D-lib Magazine v9.4, April 2003.
  Available at http//www.dlib.org/dlib/april03/lavo
  ie/04lavoie.html. Accessed July 18, 2004
• O'Neill, Edward et al. A Methodology for Sampling
  the World Wide Web. Available at
  http//digitalarchive.oclc.org/da/ViewObject.jsp?o
  bjid0000003447. Accessed July 18, 2004.
• Paolillo, John C. 2001. Language variation on
  Internet Relay Chat A social network approach.
  Journal of Sociolinguistics 5180-213.
• Reid, E. M. 1991. Electropolis Communication and
  Community on Internet Relay Chat. B.A. Honours
  Thesis, Department of History, University of
  Melbourne.
• RDF Syntax Specification. http//www.w3.org/TR/rdf
  -syntax-grammar/. Accessed July 18, 2004.
• W3C Semantic Web Activity Statement.
  http//www.w3.org/2001/sw/Activity. Accessed July
  18, 2004.
• Wasserman, Stanley and Katherine Faust. Social
  Network Analysis. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1994.

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THE END
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Knows Clusters
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In-degree and Out-degree

• What
• Links aggregated by group
• Residuals of log-linear model
• Total residual in-degree out-degree
• In-degree and out-degree are closely correlated
• Small number of groups with large inout degree

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ltrdfRDF xmlnsdc"http//purl.org/dc/elements/1.1
/" xmlnsfoaf"http//xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlnsgenid"http//id.ninebynine.org/people/"
xmlnslog"http//www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/log"
xmlnsrdf"http//www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-sy
ntax-ns" xmlnsrdfs"http//www.w3.org/2000/0
1/rdf-schema" xmlnsrfc"http//www.rfc-edito
r.org/rfc/" xmlnsrss"http//purl.org/rss/1.0
/" xmlnsw3c-tr"http//www.w3.org/TR/"
xmlnswn"http//xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/"gt ltfoafPe
rson rdfabout"genidgk"gt
ltfoafnamegtGraham Klynelt/foafnamegt
ltfoafmbox rdfresource"mailtogk-rdfweb_at_ninebyni
ne.org"/gt ltfoafgivenNamegtGrahamlt/foafgiv
enNamegt ltfoafsurnamegtKlynelt/foafsurnamegt
ltfoafhomepage rdfresource"http//www.n
inebynine.org/"/gt ltfoafknows
rdfresource"geniddanbri"/gt ltfoafknows
rdfresource"genidemiller"/gt
ltfoafknows rdfresource"genidlibby"/gt
ltfoafknows rdfresource"genidfranklinreynolds"/
gt ltfoafknows rdfresource"genidchriswoo
drow"/gt ltfoafknows rdfresource"genidhi
detakaohto"/gt ltfoafknows
rdfresource"genidlarrymasinter"/gt
ltfoafknows rdfresource"genidlloydmcintyre"/gt
ltfoafimg rdfresource"http//www.ninebyni
ne.org/Images/Gk7.jpg"/gt
ltfoafworkplaceHomePage rdfresource"http//www.m
imesweeper.com/"/gt lt/foafPersongt
... lt/rdfRDFgt