Determining influential and/or popular participants in a network using messages exchanged among a group of participants. One method includes: representing the group of participants and the messages exchanged among the group of participants as nodes and links, respectively; analyzing the messages to produce message relevant data for each node; and propagating the message relevant data of the each node out to other nodes in the network to produce an influence value for the each node, wherein the influence value indicates relative size and strength of social activity or connections of a participant corresponding to each node.
METHOD OF DETERMINING INFLUENTIAL/POPULAR PARTICIPANTS IN A COMMUNICATION NETWORK, SYSTEM OF THE SAME, APPARATUS OF THE SAME, AND A NON­TRANSITORY COMPUTER STORAGE MEDIUM STORING A COMPUTER PROGRAM