Collaborative and Structural Recommendation of Friends using Weblog-based Social Network Analysis.

In this paper, we address the problem of link recommendation in weblogs and similar social networks. First, we present an approach based on collaborative recommendation using the link structure of a social network and content-based recommendation using mutual declared interests. Next, we describe the application of this approach to a small representative subset of a large real-world social network: the user/community network of the blog service LiveJournal. We then discuss the ground features available in LiveJournal’s public user information pages and describe some graph algorithms for analysis of the social network. These are used to identify candidates, provide ground truth for recommendations, and construct features for learning the concept of a recommended link. Finally, we compare the performance of this machine learning approach to that of the rudimentary recommender system provided by LiveJournal.