Empirical analysis on the human dynamics of blogging behavior on GitHub

Deng-Cheng Yan, Zong-Wen Wei, Xiao-Pu Han and Bing-Hong Wang

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2017, vol. 465, issue C, 775-781

Abstract: GitHub is a social collaborative coding platform on which software developers not only collaborate on codes but also share knowledge through blogs using GitHub Pages. In this article, we analyze the blogging behavior of software developers on GitHub Pages. The results show that both the commit number and the inter-event time of two consecutive blogging actions follow heavy-tailed distribution. We further observe a significant variety of activity among individual developers, and a strongly positive correlation between the activity and the power-law exponent of the inter-event time distribution. We also find a difference between the user behaviors of GitHub Pages and other online systems which is driven by the diversity of users and length of contents. In addition, our result shows an obvious difference between the majority of developers and elite developers in their burstiness property.

Keywords: Human dynamics; Blogging behavior; Power-law distribution; Burstiness; Memory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:465:y:2017:i:c:p:775-781

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2016.08.054

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