Analysis of Content Popularity in Social Bookmarking Systems - Evolving Application Domains of Data Warehousing and Mining - page 233

Chapter 11
Analysis of Content Popularity
in Social Bookmarking Systems
Symeon Papadopoulos
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Informatics & Telematics Institute, Thermi, Thessaloniki,
Greece
Fotis Menemenis
Informatics & Telematics Institute, Thermi, Thessaloniki, Greece
Athena Vakali
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Ioannis Kompatsiaris
Informatics & Telematics Institute, Thermi, Thessaloniki, Greece
ABStrAct
The recent advent and wide adoption of Social Bookmarking Systems (SBS) has disrupted the traditional
model of online content publishing and consumption. Until recently, the majority of content consumed by
people was published as a result of a centralized selection process. Nowadays, the large-scale adoption
of the Web 2.0 paradigm has diffused the content selection process to the masses. Modern SBS-based
applications permit their users to submit their preferred content, comment on and rate the content of
other users and establish social relations with each other. As a result, the evolution of popularity of
socially bookmarked content constitutes nowadays an overly complex phenomenon calling for a multi-
aspect analysis approach. This chapter attempts to provide a unified treatment of the phenomenon by
studying four aspects of popularity of socially bookmarked content: (a) the distributional properties of
content consumption, (b) its evolution in time, (c) the correlation between the semantics of online content
and its popularity, and (d) the impact of online social networks on the content consumption behavior of
individuals. To this end, a case study is presented where the proposed analysis framework is applied to
a large dataset collected from Digg, a popular social bookmarking and rating application.