Fig. 3 Intercity network formed by clustering microblog user relations.
He currently is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy and Associate Director for User Relations, at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.
Microblog user relations in a virtual world comprise purely interpersonal networks; the relations in this network may consist of either "strong ties" (relations established between acquaintances) or "weak ties" (relations established between strangers) (Granovetter, [35]).
Therefore, the user relations within each city can be clustered as relations among cities, which can be utilized to map and transform interpersonal networks in a virtual network environment to intercity networks.
In this study, we clustered a large number of microblog users into city nodes based on the interpersonal relations and geographic location attributes of these users and clustered the user relations within each city into the relations among cities in the Wuhan "1+8" City Circle WCCC) to transform and map the interpersonal network in the virtual network environment to an intercity network.
This kind of analysis has been recently carried out for some types of social media platforms (such as Twitter [21]) which capture different nuances of relations (for example, hierarchical follower-followed user relations), but there was a lack in literature regarding online social network platforms reflecting friendship relations, such as Facebook.
T he three key components of microblogging are as follows (Wang et.al, [32]): the users, microblogging content and user relations, and the functions of the user relationship network are reflected in three aspects: sending, forwarding, and receiving, which similar with Twitter or Facebook (Fig. 1).
Dynamic pages and the increasing number of functions that websites can perform are changing users' relations with the Web.
In a diversified context with multiple social networking sites, heterogeneous activity patterns and different user-user relations, the concept of 'information cascade' is all but univocal.
