A Case Study on the Influence of the User Profile Enrichment on Buzz Propagation in Social Media: Experiments on Delicious

Abstract

The user is the main contributor for creating information in social media. In these media, users are influenced by the information shared through thenetwork. In a social context, there are so-called “buzz”, which is a technique to make noise around an event. This technique engenders that several users will be interested in this event at a time t. A buzz is then popular information in a specific time. A buzz may be a fact (true information) or a rumour (fake, false information). We are interested in studying buzz propagation through time in the social network Delicious. Also, we study the influence of enriched user profilesthat we proposed [2] to propagate the buzz in the same social network. In this paper, we state a case study on some information of the social network Delicious. This latter contains social annotations (tags) provided by users. These tags contribute to influence the other users to follow this information or to use it. This study relies onthree main axes: 1) we focus on tags considered as buzz and analyse their propagation through time 2) we consider a user profile as the set of tags provided by him. We will use the result of our previous work on dynamic user profile enrichment in order to analyse the influence of this enrichment in the buzz propagation. 3) we analyse each enriched user profile in order to show if the enrichment approach anticipate the buzz propagation. So, we can see the interest of filtering the information in order to avoid potential rumours and then, to propose relevant results to the user (e.g. avoid “bad” recommendation).