Modeling and Visualizing Information Propagation in Micro-Blogging Platform

Micro-blog is a kind of social network web service and has become more and more popular in daily life. In micro-blog, bloggers can exchange information and discuss ideas with each other, and share experience with friends or even strangers. This paper aims at identifying a measurement for information propagation in micro-blogs and answer the following questions:
1. How to quantify a person’s capability to distribute certain idea in a micro-blog?
2. How to measure the level of propagation of a concept in a micro-blog?
3. How to determine whether certain idea is propagated internally in a micro-blog?
We propose methods to effectively measure the capability of the information propagation for each user in micro-blogs. The measurement focuses on three aspects: (a) the number of influenced people, (b) the speed of propagation, and (c) the geographic distance of propagation. Besides, we also propose a method to identify whether a topic is propagated inside the micro-blog or based on outer media (e.g. news). In the end, we construct a online system that allows us to perform some experiments to visualize the propagation paths, influence scores, and geographical information among people with respect to the user-given terms.