Analyzing a Korean Blogosphere: A Social Network Analysis Perspective

Abstract

Due to their popularity and widespread use, blogs have become an important medium through which to communicate and exchange information on the World Wide Web. The advent of the blogosphere may provide opportunities for establishing a new business model that investigates social relationships. In Korea, there are many blogospheres that appear to maintain different characteristics from foreign blogospheres on the Internet. Consequently, it is inappropriate to apply analysis methods used for the foreign blogosphere directly to Korean blogospheres. To establish successful business policies in Korean blogospheres, the characteristics of Korean blogospheres and the behavioral patterns of bloggers should be understood. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of the Korean blog network, wherein each blogger forms a node and scraps by bloggers as edges. First, we demonstrate that the Korean blog network is also a scale-free network, like the World Wide Web. Second, we compare the Bow-tie structure of the Korean blog network with that of the World Wide Web. We expect that these analysis results will be helpful in developing effective algorithms and in establishing new business models targeted at the Korean blogosphere.