Social Capital in the Blogosphere - Nathan Purser

Social capital, the value of social connections, is a useful way to quantify a social networks potential. The Blogosphere, or the online community of individuals involved with blogs, is rapidly expanding and there is great interest in quantifying its marketing and communication potential. We used a mathematical formulation for social capital based on the explicit connections and implicit affinities found in a social network. We experiment using this formula on recent blog data to discover interesting trends and patterns. Specifically we use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic extraction algorithm to form an implicit affinity network (IAN) that highlights potential sub-communities that would result through increased bonding.