Analyzing the public events´ influence via open microblogging APIs

Microblog is a popular network platform in which people share personal experiences and discuss public events that they concern. Some researchers measure the influence of public events by analyzing the related messages on Microblog. We have found that web counters on web pages contain a lot of useful information. This paper proposes an evaluation model to provide several quantification indicators of public events´ influence (PEI). PEI indicators are calculated by the data available from open microblogging APIs. For examples, the number of users´ followers and the number of times that a message is forwarded and commented. The impacts of some important factors on PEI have also been studied, such as users´ genders, users´ geography locations and the processes of events. Extensive experiments have been carried out using data from Sina Weibo. The results show that public events have greater influence around the places where the events happen, and have more impacts to the male. Moreover, the proposed method can exactly capture the key times of one public event by observing the peaks of the PEI trajectory.