Abstract: With the development of webometrics and various network information communication platforms, effective indicators are needed to measure the efficiency of information dissemination and the speed of public opinion diffusion. This paper attempts to improve the traditional scientometrics indicators and propose the webometrics indicators suitable for measuring the extent of microblog information diffusion.Taking microblogs as nodes, forwarding relationships between microblogs as links, and ratio of relative forwarding times as relative influence weight, this paper establishes a weighted microblog forwarding network model, and proposes four microblog diffusion factors to measure node influence and information diffusion.Based on the empirical study of relevant data under 20 microblog topics, the results are as follows: the correlation between MDF-A_j, MDF-A_jo and the ranking of the microblog is close to 0.6 (bilateral significance value P <0.05). It is concluded that MDF-A_j and MDF-A_jo are effective in measuring the diffusion and the degree of breaking the original circle of a single microblog and the whole microblog topic; MDF-B_j and MDF-B_jo are also reliable in reflecting the popularity of the whole microblog topic.

Key words: Microblog, Social network analysis, Information dissemination, Directed weighted network, Diffusion factor