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Prophetic blogger identification based on buzzword prediction ability

Jianwei Zhang (Faculty of Industrial Technology, Tsukuba University of Technology, Tsukuba, Japan)
Seiya Tomonaga (Drecom Co., Ltd, Tokyo, Japan)
Shinsuke Nakajima (Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyoto Sangyo University, Kyoto, Japan)
Yoichi Inagaki (Kizasi Company, Inc, Tokyo, Japan)
Reyn Nakamoto (Kizasi Company, Inc, Tokyo, Japan)

International Journal of Web Information Systems

ISSN: 1744-0084

Article publication date: 15 August 2016

213

Abstract

Purpose

Identifying important users from social media has recently attracted much attention in the information and knowledge management community. Although researchers have focused on users’ knowledge levels on certain topics or influence degrees on other users in social networks, previous works have not studied users’ prediction ability on future popularity. This paper aims to propose a novel approach to find prophetic bloggers based on their buzzword prediction ability.

Design/methodology/approach

The main approach is to conduct a time-series analysis in the blogosphere considering four factors: post earliness, content similarity, entry frequency and buzzword coverage. Our method has four steps: categorizing a blogger into knowledgeable categories, identifying past buzzwords, analyzing a buzzword’s peak time content and growth period and, finally, evaluating a blogger’s prediction ability on a buzzword and on a category.

Findings

Experimental results on real-world blog data consisting of 150 million entries from 11 million bloggers demonstrate that the proposed approach can find prophetic bloggers and outperforms others that do not take temporal features into account.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, our approach is the first successful attempt to identify prophetic bloggers. Finding prophetic bloggers can bring great values for two reasons. First, as prophetic bloggers tend to post creative and insightful information, analysis on their blog entries may help find future buzzword candidates. Second, communication with prophetic bloggers can help understand future trends, gain insight into early adopters’ thoughts on new technology or even foresee things that will become popular.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers #26330351, #26870090.

Citation

Zhang, J., Tomonaga, S., Nakajima, S., Inagaki, Y. and Nakamoto, R. (2016), "Prophetic blogger identification based on buzzword prediction ability", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 267-291. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-03-2016-0013

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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