Structure of public expression online

Greetings from the Australian Demographic & Social Research Institute (ADSRI) at the Australian National Unviersity, where Hai Liang, Web Mining Lab, Department of Media & Communication, City University of Hong Kong s talking on "The structure of public expression and issue rise: Participation heterogeneity, concentration, and timing in internet forums". He studied 3,000 posts to Internet forums to find the the structure of the interaction. These were collected from a popular Chinese Internet forum. The results that threads of discussion which start intensively are more successful. The aim of this work was to contribute to civil society. It would be interesting to see if there are different forms of discussion in different countries, cultures and from people with different education.

The rise of public issues in Internet forums plays an important role in the formation of public opinion. This study investigates the structure of public expressions in the Internet forums, and aims to detect the structural characteristics of the successful rise of public
issues. This study analyzed 110 threads with more than 3,000 posts that were collected from a famous Chinese Internet forum. The results suggest participation heterogeneity, concentration, and intensive replies at the early stage are associated with a higher
probability of successful thread building. The model can explain 68.5% variance of the number of posts in the thread. The results imply that the structure of public expression is crucial for the rise of public issues. ...

From: The structure of public expression and issue rise: Participation heterogeneity, concentration, and timing in internet forums, ANU, 2011