Abstract
According to the spread of media for self-representing such as Internet bulletin boards, the risk that companies are suffering from “Flaming” is increasing. For the purpose of minimizing the damage from “Flaming”, this study presented the methods to evaluate “Flaming” phenomena quantitatively for Internet bulletin boards. Specifically, the situation of “Flaming” was indexed with deriving a new measure of “Flaming index” calculated using the number of postings, considering the change according to the time of day. And it was tried to grasp the temporal variation from the waveform of “Flaming index”. However, due to the feature of Internet bulletin boards, the waveform plotted using the physical time unit occasionally contained the cases in which the actual situation of “Flaming” cannot be reflected. Therefore, “Thread” that is consisted of a constant number of postings was adopted as the alternate time unit in order to calculate “Flaming index”. The waveform of “Flaming index” illustrated using “Thread” as the time unit became more smoothed compared to that plotted with the physical time unit. As a result, it became easier to distinguish in observation whether the time series of calculated index value is in the “Flaming” situation or not. In addition, it was showed that there is a possibility to conduct the prediction of “Flaming” more effectively using the quantified data calculated with “Thread” as the time unit. As our results of analyzing “Thread-lag” cross correlation between “Flaming index” and the number of postings of specific words or symbols, it was suggested that the decrease in communication among participants can be a sign of “Flaming”. As a future issue, based on the results of this study, it is necessary to create an algorithm to determine the beginning and the end of “Flaming” automatically from the waveform of “Flaming index” and the contents of postings.
