Two Paths of Glory — Structural Positions and Trajectories of Websites within Their Topical Territory

Abstract

We analyze the structure and processes of reputation building in a sample of Internet communities. Our approach uses a corpus of around 9,000 'active' French websites and blogs which have been manually labeled as belonging to a specific topical territory, such as "cooking", "crafts", or "politics". We propose a typology and map of the various structural positions that these websites may hold within their territory. This typology is essentially based on their authority status in terms of in- and out-going links and depending on whether those links come from/to outside their origin territory or not. Behind the unifying notion of "territory", we may therefore distinguish several distinct topological structures for each topic. Building upon dynamic data spanning over a period of 10 months, we are then able to exhibit characteristic trajectories of engagement into each territory and, more broadly, reputation building on the web. In particular, we suggest that there are two opposing approaches in building up online authority: either by progressively developing reputation from within the territory - thereby moving 'up' through a typical online ladder - or by exploiting fame that had been aquired prior to one's blogging activity. This descriptive model makes it possible to carry a sociological analysis of the variety of resources mobilized by bloggers to build their online reputation (relational authority, prestige, institutional support, commercial support, ...). We eventually illustrate both this phenomenon and specific successful trajectories to fame through a comprehensive study of a selection of topical territories.

Socio-semantic configuration of an online conversation space

“…The other slots are under-represented, a finding consistent with the typical structure observed in cases corresponding specifically to online deliberative spaces when adopting a purely semantic understanding of the heart (Cardon et al, 2011). The central slots of the matrix (B2-C2-B3-C3) are almost non-existent (especially C3 which corresponds to a heart-centric pattern where activity and authority relate exclusively to the heart with no regard to the shadow).…”

“…Structural model. We use and extend a structural model that had been introduced by Cardon et al (2011) in the analysis of blogspace. This model is based on a so-called "A1-D4" matrix and allows for the description of position classes defined with respect to the relative attention that nodes give and receive from inside and outside of a target group of actors (a specific group of interest).…”

Evolution of Experts in Question Answering Communities

“…They developed K-Spectral Centroid clustering algorithm and found six temporal shapes of attention of online content on the twitter dataset. (Cardon, Fouetillou, and Roth 2011) studied topic specific website and blogs over 10 months and suggested that there are two ways to build authority -either by developing reputation progressively or by exploiting prior acquired fame. They illustrated these two phenomenon in the blogosphere and showed trajectories leading towards gaining online reputation.…”