How Do Bloggers Comment: An Empirical Analysis of the Commenting Network of a Blogging Community

The blog is one of the most familiar social media to Web users. Its social nature suggests that blogging is not only about writing and publishing bloggers’ experience and thoughts, but also about establishing social relationships and networks with others through various links including citations, blogrolls, comments, and trackbacks. We have a particular interest in comments, and develop a commenting model that considers both unidirectional and bidirectional commenting relationships. This paper presents a social network analysis of the commenting network of CSDN blogging community, the largest Chinese language IT blogging community in China. According to our findings, this is a sparse network, and the most noticeable nodes in it are a few central bloggers who possess a lot of incoming relationships. Each of them is surrounded by a number of ordinary bloggers who recognize the central blogger as their exclusive information source in a star topology. Our continuing study will focus on these central bloggers and examine their influences on the information diffusion in CSDN blogging community at the semantic level.