Representative reviewers for Internet social media

Our many various relationships with persons from home, work and school give rise to our social networks. In a social network, people receive, provide, and pass a great deal of information. In this process, we often observe that certain individuals have especially strong influences on others. We call these highly influential people opinion leaders. Since the late 20th century, the number of Internet users has increased rapidly, and a huge number of people now interact with each other in online social networks. In this way, the Web community has become similar to real-world society. Internet users receive information not only from the mass media, but also from opinion leaders. For example, online articles posted by influential bloggers are often used as marketing tools or political advertisements, due to their huge influence on other users. Therefore, it is important and useful to identify the influential users in an online society. We thus propose a simple yet reliable algorithm that identifies opinion leaders in a cyber social network. In this paper, we first describe our algorithm for identifying influential users in an online society. We then demonstrate the validity of the selection of representative reviewers using the Yahoo! music and GroupLens movie databases and performing 10-fold cross-validation and z-tests.

► We propose a simple yet reliable algorithm that identifies representative reviewers for social media based on user ratings. ► Representative reviewers are helpful for Web recommendation systems and Web marketing. ► We validate the proposed algorithm using the Yahoo! music and GroupLens movie database by performing 10-fold cross-validation and z-tests. ► We demonstrate that the top 10 highly representative among users in a social network.