Comment-Based Discussion Communities in the Russian LiveJournal and Their Topical Coherence

Abstract

We study the structure of online discussions in order to uncover latent communities of socially important debate. Our research reveals that discussion communities defined by mutual commenting in the Russian language blogosphere are centered mainly around blog authors as opinion leaders and, to a lesser extent, around a shared topic or topics. We have derived these conclusions from the dataset of 17,386 full text posts written by top 2,000 LiveJournal bloggers and over 520,000 comments that result in about 4.5 million edges in the network of co-commenting.

Keywords: Comment-based communities, online discussion, blogs, Russia

JEL Classification: Z19