Physics – Physics and Society
Scientific paper
2007-01-31
Phys. Rev. E 76, 036103 (2007)
Physics
Physics and Society
Scientific paper
10.1103/PhysRevE.76.036103
We present an empirical study of the networks created by users within internet news groups and forums and show that they organise themselves into scale-free trees. The structure of these trees depends on the topic under discussion; specialist topics have trees with a short shallow structure whereas more universal topics are discussed widely and have a deeper tree structure. For news groups we find that the distribution of the time intervals between when a message is posted and when it receives a response exhibits a composite power-law behaviour. From our statistics we can see if the news group or forum is free or is overseen by a moderator. The correlation function of activity, the number of messages posted in a given time, shows long range correlations connected with the users' daily routines. The distribution of distances between each message and its root is exponential for most news groups and power-law for the forums. For both formats we find that the relation between the supremacy (the total number of nodes that are \emph{under} the node $i$, including node $i$) and the degree is linear $s(k)\sim k$, in contrast to the analytical relation for Barab\'{a}si-Albert network.
Holyst Janusz A.
Kujawski Bernard
Rodgers Geoff J.
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