  How do blogs cite and influence each other? How do such links evolve? Does
the popularity of old blog posts drop exponentially with time? These are some
of the questions that we address in this work. Our goal is to build a model
that generates realistic cascades, so that it can help us with link prediction
and outlier detection.
  Blogs (weblogs) have become an important medium of information because of
their timely publication, ease of use, and wide availability. In fact, they
often make headlines, by discussing and discovering evidence about political
events and facts. Often blogs link to one another, creating a publicly
available record of how information and influence spreads through an underlying
social network. Aggregating links from several blog posts creates a directed
graph which we analyze to discover the patterns of information propagation in
blogspace, and thereby understand the underlying social network. Not only are
blogs interesting on their own merit, but our analysis also sheds light on how
rumors, viruses, and ideas propagate over social and computer networks.
  Here we report some surprising findings of the blog linking and information
propagation structure, after we analyzed one of the largest available datasets,
with 45,000 blogs and ~ 2.2 million blog-postings. Our analysis also sheds
light on how rumors, viruses, and ideas propagate over social and computer
networks. We also present a simple model that mimics the spread of information
on the blogosphere, and produces information cascades very similar to those
found in real life.
