Identifying opinion leaders in the blogosphere

Opinion leaders are those who bring in new information, ideas, and opinions, then disseminate them down to the masses, and thus influence the opinions and decisions of others by a fashion of word of mouth. Opinion leaders capture the most representative opinions in the social network, and consequently are important for understanding the massive and complex blogosphere. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm called InfluenceRank to identify opinion leaders in the blogosphere. The InfluenceRank algorithm ranks blogs according to not only how important they are as compared to other blogs, but also how novel the information they can contribute to the network. Experimental results indicate that our proposed algorithm is effective in identifying influential opinion leaders.