Showing papers on "Social media published in 2006"

Social Browsing on Flickr

Abstract: The new social media sites - blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and Flickr, among others - underscore the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are actively creating, evaluating and distributing information. The photo-sharing site Flickr, for example, allows users to upload photographs, view photos created by others, comment on those photos, etc. As is common to other social media sites, Flickr allows users to designate others as ``contacts'' and to track their activities in real time. The contacts (or friends) lists form the social network backbone of social media sites. We claim that these social networks facilitate new ways of interacting with information, e.g., through what we call social browsing. The contacts interface on Flickr enables users to see latest images submitted by their friends. Through an extensive analysis of Flickr data, we show that social browsing through the contacts' photo streams is one of the primary methods by which users find new images on Flickr. This finding has implications for creating personalized recommendation systems based on the user's declared contacts lists.

Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg.

Abstract: The new social media sites — blogs, wikis, Flickr and Digg, among others — underscore the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are actively creating, evaluating and distributing information. Digg is a social news aggregator which allows users to submit links to, vote on and discuss news stories. Each day Digg selects a handful of stories to feature on its front page. Rather than rely on the opinion of a few editors, Digg aggregates opinions of thousands of its users to decide which stories to promote to the front page. Digg users can designate other users as “friends” and easily track friends’ activities: what new stories they submitted, commented on or read. The friends interface acts as a social filtering system, recommending to user stories his or her friends liked or found interesting. By tracking the votes received by newly submitted stories over time, we showed that social filtering is an effective information filtering approach. Specifically, we showed that (a) users tend to like stories submitted by friends and (b) users tend to like stories their friends read and liked. Social filtering is a promising new technology that can be used to personalize and tailor information to individual users: for example, through personal front pages.

Social Browsing on Flickr

Abstract: The new social media sites—blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and Flickr, among others—underscore the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are actively creating, evaluating and distributing information. The photo-sharing site Flickr, for example, allows users to upload photographs, view photos created by others, comment on those photos, etc. As is common to other social media sites, Flickr allows users to designate others as "contacts" and to track their activ- ities in real time. The contacts (or friends) lists form the social network backbone of social media sites. These social networks facilitate new ways of interacting with information, e.g., through what we call social browsing. The contacts inter- face on Flickr enables users to see latest images submitted by their friends. Through an extensive analysis of Flickr data, we show that social browsing through the contacts' photo streams is one of the primary methods by which users find new images on Flickr. This finding has implications for creat- ing personalized recommendation systems based on the user's declared contacts lists.

Sport and the Media: Managing the nexus

Abstract: Preface Section 1: Sport Media Foundations 1. Sport and the Media: A Defining Relationship 2. The Evolution of the Nexus: Understanding the Game Section 2: Sport Media Landscapes 3. The Sport and Media Industries: Meeting the Global Players 4. Broadcast Rights and Revenue: Putting up Big Numbers 5. Sport Media Regulation: Making the Rules Section 3: Sport Media Professionals 6. Sport Journalists: Friend or Foe? 7. Sport Media Relations Practitioners: Inside the Team Section 4: Sport Media Strategies 8. Sport Media Planning and Promotion: The Foundations of Coverage 9. Sport Media Communications: Feeding the Media 10. Sport Media Interactions: Working with the Media 11. Sport and Social Media: Keeping up with the Tweets, Posts and Links 12. Major Sport Event Media Management: Controlling the Chaos 13. Managing Crises, Scandals and Reputations: Not All Publicity is Good

How will social media affect museum communication

Abstract: Social media enable cultural participants to both explore images of themselves and distribute those images across broad online social networks. Museums worldwide are starting to use social media such as blogs, wikis and vlogs to engage online participants with new interactive experiences. This represents a shift in the ways in which museums: • act as trusted cultural online networks; • distribute community knowledge; and • view their role as custodians of cultural content. It is this broader distribution of community knowledge which sets social media technologies apart from more traditional outreach models where museums work with audiences. As the products of social media are readily available online, their existence within museum communication programs presents debate around an institution’s investment in its own continuing cultural authority. This paper will investigate some of the issues surrounding the use of social media in museum programs and will argue that there are strong epistemological reasons for social media to add value to museum programs.

No Booze? You May Lose: Why Drinkers Earn More Money than Nondrinkers

Abstract: A number of theorists assume that drinking has harmful economic effects, but data show that drinking and earnings are positively correlated. We hypothesize that drinking leads to higher earnings by increasing social capital. If drinkers have larger social networks, their earnings should increase. Examining the Gen-eral Social Survey, we find that selfreported drinkers earn 1014 percent more than abstainers, which replicates results from other data sets. We then attempt to differentiate between social and nonsocial drinking by comparing the earn-ings of those who frequent bars at least once per month and those who do not. We find that males who frequent bars at least once per month earn an addi-tional 7 percent on top of the 10 percent drinkers’ premium. These results sug-gest that social drinking leads to increased social capital.

Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg

Abstract: The new social media sites -- blogs, wikis, Flickr and Digg, among others -- underscore the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are actively creating, evaluating and distributing information. Digg is a social news aggregator which allows users to submit links to, vote on and discuss news stories. Each day Digg selects a handful of stories to feature on its front page. Rather than rely on the opinion of a few editors, Digg aggregates opinions of thousands of its users to decide which stories to promote to the front page. Digg users can designate other users as ``friends'' and easily track friends' activities: what new stories they submitted, commented on or read. The friends interface acts as a \emph{social filtering} system, recommending to user stories his or her friends liked or found interesting. By tracking the votes received by newly submitted stories over time, we showed that social filtering is an effective information filtering approach. Specifically, we showed that (a) users tend to like stories submitted by friends and (b) users tend to like stories their friends read and liked. As a byproduct of social filtering, social networks also play a role in promoting stories to Digg's front page, potentially leading to ``tyranny of the minority'' situation where a disproportionate number of front page stories comes from the same small group of interconnected users. Despite this, social filtering is a promising new technology that can be used to personalize and tailor information to individual users: for example, through personal front pages.

Social media platform and method

Abstract: A Social Media Platform and method are provided wherein contextual content, in real-time, is delivered to a user along with the original content from which the contextual content is derived.

Blogs and wikis: A personal journey

Abstract: Describes the use of social software and social media, incorporating blogs and wikis, to develop websites to support internal communication and collaboration in a law firm. Explains that blogs foster regular and timely personal communication and dialogue for a defined group, and wikis can be used to create knowledge resources or as a collaborative working or project management tool. Outlines the traditional knowledge management model for law firms, and explains how the arrival of a new global head of know-how and training prompted the investigation of how social media might support the firm’s knowhow systems. Provides advice on how to successfully set up an initial blog or wiki project.

Social network commerce model

Abstract: Rules-based commerce system or marketplace that proactively acquires and purchases, on behalf of consumers, works submitted by creators. In one implementation, the system involves a rules engine which makes current and future purchases of electronic content and code based on the positive fulfillment of specific pre-created criteria. Some particular implementations of the invention can be implemented to create a net of income from a large quantity of sources in order to support one or more social media activities. Other implementations of the invention can be configured to create forms of sponsorship whereby a consumer can create rules to automatically acquire and pay for a future work that meets one or more criteria. On the creator side, implementations of the invention can be configured to assist creators to develop an audience and corresponding income streams to support social media creation activities.

Social networks, incentives, and search

Abstract: The role of network structure has grown in significance over the past ten years in the field of information retrieval, stimulated to a great extent by the importance of link analysis in the development of Web search techniques [4]. This body of work has focused primarily on the network that is most clearly visible on the Web: the network of hyperlinks connecting documents to documents. But the Web has always contained a second network, less explicit but equally important, and this is the social network on its users, with latent person-to-person links encoding a variety of relationships including friendship, information exchange, and influence. Developments over the past few years --- including the emergence of social networking systems and rich social media, as well as the availability of large-scale e-mail and instant messenging datasets --- have highlighted the crucial role played by on-line social networks, and at the same time have made them much easier to uncover and analyze. There is now a considerable opportunity to exploit the information content inherent in these networks, and this prospect raises a number of interesting research challenge.Within this context, we focus on some recent efforts to formalize the problem of searching a social network. The goal is to capture the issues underlying a variety of related scenarios: a member of a social networking system such as MySpace seeks a piece of information that may be held by a friend of a friend [27, 28]; an employee in a large company searches his or her network of colleagues for expertise in a particular subject [9]; a node in a decentralized peer-to-peer file-sharing system queries for a file that is likely to be a small number of hops away [2, 6, 16, 17]; or a user in a distributed IR or federated search setting traverses a network of distributed resources connected by links that may not just be informational but also economic or contractual [3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 18, 21]. In their most basic forms, these scenarios have some essential features in common: a node in a network, without global knowledge, must find a short path to a desired "target" node (or to one of several possible target nodes).To frame the underlying problem, we go back to one of the most well-known pieces of empirical social network analysis --- Stanley Milgram's research into the small-world phenomenon, also known as the "six degrees of separation" [19, 24, 25]. The form of Milgram's experiments, in which randomly chosen starters had to forward a letter to a designated target individual, established not just that short chains connecting far-flung pairs of people are abundant in large social networks, but also that the individuals in these networks, operating with purely local information about their own friends and acquaintances, are able to actually find these chains [10]. The Milgram experiments thus constituted perhaps the earliest indication that large-scale social networks are structured to support this type of decentralized search. Within a family of random-graph models proposed by Watts and Strogatz [26], we have shown that the ability of a network to support this type of decentralized search depends in subtle ways on how its "long-range" connections are correlated with the underlying spatial or organizational structure in which it is embedded [10, 11]. Recent studies using data on communication within organizations [1] and the friendships within large on-line communities [15] have established the striking fact that real social networks closely match some of the structural features predicted by these mathematical models.If one looks further at the on-line settings that provide the initial motivation for these issues, there is clearly interest from many directions in their long-term economic implications --- essentially, the consequences that follow from viewing distributed information retrieval applications, peer-to-peer systems, or social-networking sites as providing marketplaces for information and services. How does the problem of decentralized search in a network change when the participants are not simply agents following a fixed algorithm, but strategic actors who make decisions in their own self-interest, and may demand compensation for taking part in a protocol? Such considerations bring us into the realm of algorithmic game theory, an active area of current research that uses game-theoretic notions to quantify the performance of systems in which the participants follow their own self-interest [20, 23] In a simple model for decentralized search in the presence of incentives, we find that performance depends crucially on both the rarity of the information and the richness of the network topology [12] --- if the network is too structurally impoverished, an enormous investment may be required to produce a path from a query to an answer.

Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies

Abstract: Conquer the online marketplace with this new version of a bestseller!Whether you've thought of starting an online business or you're already selling online, this update to a bestseller presents invaluable advice for getting--and keeping--online customers. Covering everything from creating a business plan and building a customer-friendly site to marketing with Facebook and Twitter, this fun and friendly guide features eleven minibooks that cover online business basics, legal and accounting matters, website design, online and operating issues, Internet security, techniques for boosting sales, storefront selling, fundraising sites, niche e-commerce, and more.Updated to include coverage of the latest online marketing tools, techniques, and trendsIncludes coverage?of how to use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Yelp to reach your customers as well as expanded coverage of mobile marketingExplains how your location can actually bring new customers to youDetails ways to build a business plan that translates your ideas into a profitable enterpriseShares advice for choosing software to help you manage taxes, balance sheets, and other accounting chores; using PR and advertising tools that best promote your business online, including Google AdWords; and create a website that helps your business make moneyDiscover why "online entrepreneurship" means more than just building a website. Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies breaks down everything the budding entrepreneur needs to know to be successful online and keep your customers coming back for more.?

A Contact Recommender System for a Mediated Social Media

Abstract: Within corporate intranet or on the WWW, a global search engine is the main service used to discover and sort information. Nevertheless, even the most “intelligent” ones have great difficulties to select those targeted to each user specific needs and preferences. We have built a mediated social media named SoMeONe, which helps people to control their information exchanges through trusted relationships. A key component of this system is a contact recommender, which helps people to open their relationship networks by exchanging targeted information with qualified new users. Instead of using only matching between interests of users, this “socially aware” recommender system also takes into account existing relationships in the social network of the system. In this paper, we describe the computations of those recommendations based on a social network analysis.

Distributed social systems

Abstract: The study of large-scale networks has emerged over the past several years as a theme that spans many disciplines, ranging from computing and information science to the social and biological sciences. Indeed, a shared interest in network structure is arguably one of the forces that is helping draw many of these disciplines closer together. As one aspect of this broader theme, we consider a convergence of ideas taking place at the boundary between distributed computer networks and human social networks --- the former consisting of computing devices linked by an underlying communication medium, and the latter consisting of people and organizations in society connected by ties that represent friendship, interaction, and influence.Distributed computing systems have long been intertwined with the social networks that link their user populations. Recent developments, however, have added further dimensions to this relationship: the growth of blogging, social networking services, and other forms of social media on the Internet have made large-scale social networks more transparent to the general public than ever before. They have also raised new research challenges at the interface of computer science and the social sciences --- challenges in which the study of distributed computing has the potential to provide considerable insight.We discuss three related areas that illustrate the issues at this interface. The first is centered around the small-world phenomenon --- the premise that most pairs of individuals in a social network are linked by very short paths (or "six degrees of separation") [36]. In earlier work, we proposed that the social-psychology experiments providing the first empirical evidence for the phenomenon [25, 35] were related in fundamental ways to the problem of decentralized routing [14], and this theme has been pursued in a number of subsequent papers (e.g. [5, 8, 15, 17, 24, 29, 31, 32]). This line of research has helped to abstract some of the general principles underlying random graphs in which decentralized routing and search are feasible --- structures in which local information is sufficient to reach designated targets in the network. In the process, close connections have been developed to research in the design of decentralized peer-to-peer systems [3, 20, 21, 22, 23], and some of the patterns suggested by the basic models of small-world networks have been borne out to a striking extent by empirical studies of social network structure [2, 19].As a second area, we consider cascading behavior and the diffusion of information in networks. Rumors, fads, innovations, social movements, and diseases spread through human social networks [9, 28, 30, 33] in much the way that information propagates through a distributed system. And as with small-world networks, the analogies between the computational and social versions of these phenomena turn out to be deep rather than superficial. One of the oldest connections here was the pioneering work on epidemic algorithms presented by Demers et al. at PODC 1987 [6], in which probabilistic rules for information dissemination in distributed systems are modeled on aspects of biological epidemics (see [12] for a recent overview of this topic). Recent work has exploited similar analogies in the development of viral marketing strategies to promote new innovations by word-of-mouth effects [7, 13, 18, 27], in the growth of on-line communities and social networking sites [4], and in the analysis of information cascades among weblogs [1, 10].Finally, we consider game-theoretic models for these types of search and diffusion processes. The use of game theory to analyze networks of interacting strategic agents has become an active area of research in computer science (see e.g. [11, 26, 34]); in the present context we can ask how the introduction of economic incentives affects the performance of decentralized search or information diffusion algorithms. In particular, if the intermediaries on a path from a query to an answer require compensation for their participation in the search, then the dynamics of the system depend crucially on both the structure of the network and on the rarity of the answer; the resulting analysis leads to natural questions related to strategic behavior in branching processes [16].

The "Data Slant": Why Lack of Media Generated by Minority Users Online Is an Offline Problem

Abstract: Introduction As society continues its transition into the digital age, it should be no surprise that online activities increasingly influence the offline world. These online activities, specifically user-generated media such as blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, are rapidly becoming an integral aspect of political as well as commercial discourse. David Bohrman, CNN's Washington bureau chief, told MiamiHerald.com on 1 November 2006, "[M]ost of the political dialogue in this country is happening online, so if you don't incorporate that into your coverage, you're missing a major element. Moreover, commercial advertising expenditures "on user-generated online media is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 106.1 percent from 2005 to 2010, reaching $757 million in 2010" (PQ Media 2006). This is due in part to services such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which analyze user-generated media for the specific purpose of leveraging that information to the benefit of their clients. However, the usefulness of the information derived from user-generated media is contentious. I argue that what could be exceptionally valuable data is fundamentally biased and skewed, an outcome owing to the disproportionately low amount of minority user-generated media on the Web. Therefore, as reliance upon this inaccurate information proliferates, commercial entities and politicians neglect a significant portion of potential consumers and constituents because of the inevitable effects of online activities upon the offline world. In order to correct what I term the "data slant," politicians and commercial entities must actively seek information from minorities offline to supplement data derived from user-generated media online, or markedly increase investment in measures designed to bridge the digital divide--the primary source of the data slant problem. Ultimately, without political and commercial intervention, failure to remedy the data slant will likely lead to long-term economic, political, and social consequences. This paper is organized into four sections. The first section provides an overview of the most common forms of user-generated media, the demographics of its producers, and notable instances of its growing influence beyond the Web. Second, I briefly describe the digital divide--the primary source of the data slant problem--and highlight the significance of Internet access. Accordingly, the third section considers the likely economic and political consequences of failure to address the data slant. The fourth section discusses potential uses for user-generated media (UGM) within the Latino community and its resultant internal and external effects. The final section offers recommendations concerning offline data supplementation and outlines past proposals to overcome the digital divide. User-Generated Media: What Is It? Who Does It? And Why Should You Care? Blogs, Vlogs, and Podcasts UGM encompasses the content developed and circulated by users on the Web. The most prominent forms of this type of online expression include blogs, vlogs, and podcasts. Presently, the most pervasive form of UGM is the blog. A Web log, as it was originally named, "describe[d] the simple web pages people made to post links to interesting sites that they had found while surfing the Web" (Kuhns and Crew 2005, 5). Web logs gained momentum in the mid-1990s and became known as "blogs" in 1998, due to a Web log post by Peter Merholz, president and founding partner of the San Francisco-based consulting firm Adaptive Path (Kuhns and Crew 2005, 5). Within three years of the term's creation, blog "became the most consulted term in the Merriam Webster dictionary" (7th Society and Information Technologies Encounter). With the help of publishing platforms such as Blogger.com and LiveJournal, the popularity of blogging--the "process of posting a text journal entry (to your own ... blog page) or contributing a comment or response as a visitor (to another person's . …

The Asocial Responselessness of Unfocused Interaction in Computer Mediated Communication

Abstract: This thesis contributes to the domain of awareness information Awareness information can be viewed as a fundamental building-block of social media, visualizing people and their activities in an online setting With life becoming more and more influenced by social media such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Linkedin and Digg, it becomes important for designers of social media to have an understanding of how users respond to awareness information An online gallery of pictures was developed and equipped with a chat and a basic awareness information system Usage data was collected by the system and analyzed combining qualitative as well as quantitative approaches aiming to explore the influence awareness information have on the usage of the system The analysis reveals that awareness information is a powerful tool triggering social behaviour It is, at the same time, challenging to implement in a way that it provides a sound environment for social interaction This was manifested by co-present users both stayed longer in the system and also was inclined to take a different path through the gallery than the solitary user However, the interaction that took place in the gallery was characterized by frequent conversational break-downs and irritation among users Results indicate that this is, in part, due to the lack of built-in social norms guiding users in their activities in the system Subsequently, it is important to facilitate the creation, recreation and reinforcement of social norms when designing social systems