Identifying Influencers in Computer Networks

Identifying influencers in a computer network by adjusting influence weights of corresponding participants of a computer network, where the influence weights relate to a topic, where each of the influence weights is adjusted in accordance with a predefined adjustment function, and where the predefined adjustment function uses a) the influence weight of any of the participants that disseminated content via the computer network, where the content relates to the participant whose influence weight is being adjusted, b) a participant topic similarity value of any of the participants that disseminated the content, where the participant topic similarity value relates to the topic, and c) a relationship topic similarity value of any relationship between the participants that disseminated the content and the participant whose influence weight is being adjusted, where the relationship topic similarity value relates to the topic, and then ranking the participants by their influence weights.