CSSS 2010 Santa Fe-Final Papers

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Human Mobility in an Online World

Massive multiplayer online games provide a fascinating new way of observing hundreds of thousands of simultaneously interacting individuals engaged in virtual socio-economic activities. We have compiled a data set consisting of practically all actions of all players over a period of three years from an online game played by over 350,000 people. The universe of this online world is a network on which players move to interact with other players. This interaction may consist of trade, armed conflict, friendship and enmity. We focus on the mobility of human players on the network over a time-period of 500 days. We take a number of mobility measurements (daily and biweekly position changes, entropy, number of unique nodes visited) of players and compare them with measures of simulated random walkers on the same topology. Player mobility is highly different from the mobility of unbiased random walkers. The analysis of biased random walkers reveals the two essential ingredients which explain measured human mobility patterns most accurately: heterogeneity and a tendency to return to recently visited locations. We compare our entropy distributions with human mobility in real life world -- measured via mobile phone data -- and find a striking match.

By Michael Szell, Giovanni Petri, Kang Zhao, Drew Levin

• Working Paper

Who Blogs What: Understanding Behavior, Impact and Types of Bloggers

We investigated bloggers’ publishing patterns by focusing on the topics that their posts cover. Applying clustering algorithms on the dataset from a blog website of 370,000 posts from 2,275 blogs, we identified two types of bloggers: specialists and generalists. Then we compared their respective contributions to the blogosphere in terms of productivity and buzz-factor. Our analysis suggests that specialists generally have a higher impact than generalists. It also reveals that among specialists, there are very few who create a large “buzz” or produce a voluminous output.

By Kang Zhao and Massimiliano Spaziani

• Report