PALESTRA

 

Traffic Characteristics and Communication

Patterns in Blogosphere

 

Prof. Virgilio Augusto F. Almeida

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

 

Dia 10/03/2008 das 13:45 às 14:45 – Sala H-301

Abstract - In the talk we present a thorough characterization of the access patterns in blogspace – a fast-growing constituent of the content available through the Internet – which comprises a rich interconnected web of blog postings and comments by an increasingly prominent user community that collectively define what has become known as the blogosphere. Our characterization of over 35 million read, write, and administrative requests spanning a 28-day period is done from three different blogosphere perspectives. The server view characterizes the aggregate access patterns of all users to all blogs; the user view characterizes how individual users interact with blogosphere objects (blogs); the object view characterizes how individual blogs are accessed.

Our findings support two important conclusions. First, we show that the nature of interactions between users and objects is fundamentally different in blogosphere than that observed in traditional web content. Access to objects in blogspace could be conceived as part of an interaction between an author and its readership. As we show in our work, such interactions range from one-to-many “broadcast-type” and many-to-one “registration-type” communication between an author and its readers, to multi-way, iterative “parlor-type” dialogues among members of an interest group. This more-interactive nature of the blogosphere leads to interesting traffic and communication patterns, which are different from and characterize novel features of the blogosphere, such as the role of search engines “smooth out” the effect of blog popularity and the most accessed blogs result from users being directed to blogs through the link structures of blogspace.

O Prof. Virgilio Almeida is a professor of the Computer Science Department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. His research interests include performance modeling and analysis of large scale distributed systems and large social networks. In particular, his current research work is focused on the interaction of social networks and system behavior, including factors such as performance, availability and malicious behavior. Virgilio is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Scholar Award. He held visiting professor positions at Boston University and Polytechnic University of Catalunya in Barcelona and held visiting appointments at Xerox PARC and Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratory.