Estimating relevance of items on basis of proximity of user groups on blogspace

We describe a new method to estimate the relevance of two items (such as products and works of art) on the basis of the relationship between the corresponding user (blogger) groups on a blogspace, where a user group refers to a collection of users interested in an item. We estimated the strength of the relationship between user groups on the basis of their proximity on the blogspace. We validated our approach through experimental studies using actual data. In developing the method for estimating relevance among items, we introduced a new technique for measuring the proximity of two groups of vertices on a network, which can be thought of as an extension of conventional cooccurrence analysis.