An Agent-Based Model of Personal Web Communities

The idea that people use the Web and make the Web at the same time is an interesting starting point to study it. Personal homepages, blogs and similar websites can be studied as a social network phenomenon because social characteristics can explain their nature and dynamic. We present a computational Agent-Based model of personal web communities. Agents maintain their homepages and the web network emerges as they make links to colleagues’ homepages, with whom they share common interests. Three simple rules we have summarized in the “similarity”, “bookmarks” and “activity” concepts allow to explain most of the network properties presented in real web communities. The similarity in personal interests conditions the network structure, mainly the average social distance between individuals. The way in which agents search information in the Web influences the probability of meeting new people and has a big effect on the transitivity of the web network.