bloggers’ community characteristics and influence within greek political blogosphere博客的社会特征和影响在希腊的政治博客.pdfVIP

Future Internet 2012, 4, 396-412; doi:10.3390/fi4020396 OPEN ACCESS future internet ISSN 1999-5903 /journal/futureinternet Article Bloggers’ Community Characteristics and Influence within Greek Political Blogosphere Kostas Zafiropoulos 1,*, Vasiliki Vrana 2 and Dimitrios Vagianos 1 1 Department of International and European Studies, University of Macedonia, Egnatia 156, Thessaloniki 54006, Greece; E-Mail: vagianos@uom.gr 2 Department of Business Administration, Technological Education Institute of Serres, Terma Magnesias, Serres 62124, Greece; E-Mail: vrana@teiser.gr * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: kz@uom.gr; Tel.: +30-2310-891-487; Fax: +30-2310-891-285. Received: 27 February 2012; in revised form: 9 April 2012 / Accepted: 12 April 2012 / Published: 19 April 2012 Abstract: This paper investigates the properties of central or core political blogs. They can be located as clusters of blogs whose members have many incoming links. Other blogs form clouds around them in the sense that they link the core blogs. A case study records Greek political blogs and their incoming links reported through their blogrolls. The adjacency matrix from the blogs’ social network is analyzed and clusters are located. Three of them, those with the larger numbers of incoming links, may be considered to be central. Next, four measures of influence are used to test the influence of the central blogs. The findings suggest that there are many kinds of central blogs, i