Software spots key players in online communities - tech - 20 July 2007 - New Scientist Tech
Software that identifies the most informative people in an online community, based on their posting patterns, has been developed by researchers at Cornell University, New York, and Microsoft Research in Washington State, both in the US.
The researchers worked out how to spot key players within discussions by analysing the connections between thousands of messages on several topics.
The work could help website designers automatically reward, or highlight, the most valuable members of a community, or improve methods for searching through a conversation for the most relevant information.
Previous research has shown that certain people underpin the usefulness of a group or discussion by providing brief but straightforward and useful answers.
"You have a socially recognised role of some people as experts in some way in a community," says Howard Welser, a sociologist at Cornell University, who led the work. "That role was what we were trying to measure. The indicators we found had to do with the structure of their interaction with others."
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