Scaling and correlations in dynamic of e-communities

In the research of users behavior square-root scaling was found between the
total number of transitions during a single visit on Internet portals and the
average number of unique subpages. A model of portal surfing is developed
where the browsing process corresponds to a self-attracting walk on the
weighted network with a short memory.The collective character of affective
phenomena was shown on a large scale as observed in four million posts
downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BBC Forums. To test whether the emotions of a
community member may influence the emotions of others, posts were grouped into
clusters of messages with similar emotional valences. The frequency of long
clusters was much higher than it would be if emotions occurred at random.
Distributions for cluster lengths can be explained by preferential processes
because conditional probabilities for consecutive messages grow as a power law
with cluster length.

The empirical study of user activity in online BBC discussion forums, shows
that most posts contain negative emotions and the most active users in
individual threads express predominantly negative sentiments. We also give
evidence that in BBC forums the initial emotional level discussion plays role
of fuel. The emotions driving the discussion dry out, the thread is no longer
of interest to its participants and it may die.