ABSTRACT
Blogosphere contains both single-authored blog sites known as individual blog sites and multiauthored blog sites or community blog sites. In individual blog sites, only one author creates blog posts and readers are allowed to comment on these posts, but the readers cannot create new entries. In community blog sites, several authors can create blog posts and comments. Readers are allowed to comment but only registered members of the community can author blog posts. Based on these different entities on the blogosphere we have two types of familiar strangers on blogosphere: groups and individuals. It is highly likely that both these types of familiar strangers occur in the Long Tail [2] as depicted in Figure 15.1, because the bloggers in the Short Head are highly authoritative, which means they are highly connected, hence less chances of being strangers. Moreover, existing search engines return relevant results only from the Short Head, so it is interesting and challenging to study the ones that appear in the Long Tail. In this Chapter we focus on individual familiar strangers.
