Roles in Local Communities and Global Position in Social Media

Abstract

An organization of any society often takes on a complex structure, where many different communities may be identified which include or overlap one another. A significant question is how local activities affect its global position and also facilitate gaining position in other local communities. We discuss a problem of how a local group supports the user in achieving a significant global position. In this paper we present a model of the system containing descriptions of users and roles as well as results of analyses using data gathered from the blog portal Salon24. We describe relationships between global roles played by users in the whole social portal and local roles in given identified communities. Additionally, other useful characteristics of users of such analyzed portals are presented, such as: numbers of groups to which users with given roles belongs or the total numbers of global and local roles.