Stickiness of Commercial Virtual Communities

The recent merging of the electronic market arena has enabled the creation of new environments in which consumers can interact with each other online – Commercial Virtual Communities (CVC). The strategic question facing internet businesses today is what are the components of the glue that makes consumers stay and return to websites in general and to CVCs in particular, i.e. how can one increase the stickiness of a CVC? This paper provides an insight into the nature of CVCs and the factors that drive their stickiness. The resulting framework is evaluated with the help of a survey among CVC experts. The results of the survey are presented.economics of technology ;

Measuring spatial and temporal features of physical interaction dynamics in the workplace

Human behavior unfolding through organisational life is a topic tackled from different disciplines, with emphasis on different aspects and with an overwhelming reliance on humans as observation instruments. Advances in pervasive technologies allow for the first time to capture and record location and time information behavior in real time, accurately, continuously and for multiparty events. This thesis concerns itself with the examination of the question: can these technologies provide insights into human behavior that current methods cannot? The way people use the buildings they work in, relate and physically interact with others, through time, is information that designers and managers make use of to create better buildings and better organisations. Current methods’ depiction of these issues - fairly static, discrete and short term, mostly dyadic - pales in comparison with the potential offered by location and time technologies. Or does it? Having found an organisation, where fifty-one workers each carried a tag sending out location and time information to one such system for six weeks, two parallel studies were conducted. One using current manual and other methods and the other the automated method developed in this thesis, both aiming to understand spatial and temporal characteristics of interpersonal behavior in the workplace. This new method is based on the concepts and measures of personal space and interaction distance that are used to define the mathematical boundaries of the behaviors subject of study, interaction and solo events. Outcome information from both methods is used to test hypotheses on some aspects of the spatial and temporal nature of knowledge work affected by interpersonal dynamics. This thesis proves that the data obtained through the technology can be converted in rich information on some aspects of workplace interaction dynamics offering unprecedented insights for designers and managers to produce better buildings and better organisations

A user centred approach to the modelling of contextualised experience adaptation in relation to video consumption

This research focused on the development of a user centric framework for the interpretation of contextualised TV and video viewing experiences (UX). Methods to address content overload and provide better contextualisation when consuming video have been an area of academic discussion for almost 20 years (Burke, Felfernig, & Goker, 2011). However over the same period technical system design for video has actually moved away from attempts to model the nature of real viewing contexts. With now near ubiquitous access to video from a range of disparate devices the addition of contextualisation within video applications and devices represents an opportunity in terms of improving viewer UX. Three user studies were carried out to inform development of the framework and employed mixed method approaches. The first focused on understanding where video is watched and the contextual factors that defined those places as viewing situations. This study derived eight Archetype viewing situations and associated contextual cues. The second study measured viewing UX in context. Significant differences in subjective ratings for measured UX were found when viewing was compared within subjects across Viewing Archetype situations. A third study characterised viewing UX, identifying behavioural, environmental and technological factors which through observed frequency and duration were identified as indicative enablers and detractors in the creation of viewing UX. Concepts generated within the studies that related to viewing context identification and viewing UX classification through experiential factors were integrated into the framework. The framework provides a way through which to identify, describe and improve viewing UX across contexts. Additionally the framework was referenced to develop an exemplar system model for contextual adaptation in order to show its relevance to the generation of technical system design. Finally information for designers was created in the form of scenarios and suggestions for use in order to bring the framework to life as a resource for development teams

Extroverts Tweet Differently from Introverts in Weibo

Being dominant factors driving the human actions, personalities can be excellent indicators in predicting the offline and online behavior of different individuals. However, because of the great expense and inevitable subjectivity in questionnaires and surveys, it is challenging for conventional studies to explore the connection between personality and behavior and gain insights in the context of large amount individuals. Considering the more and more important role of the online social media in daily communications, we argue that the footprint of massive individuals, like tweets in Weibo, can be the inspiring proxy to infer the personality and further understand its functions in shaping the online human behavior. In this study, a map from self-reports of personalities to online profiles of 293 active users in Weibo is established to train a competent machine learning model, which then successfully identifies over 7,000 users as extroverts or introverts. Systematical comparisons from perspectives of tempo-spatial patterns, online activities, emotion expressions and attitudes to virtual honor surprisingly disclose that the extrovert indeed behaves differently from the introvert in Weibo. Our findings provide solid evidence to justify the methodology of employing machine learning to objectively study personalities of massive individuals and shed lights on applications of probing personalities and corresponding behaviors solely through online profiles.Comment: Datasets of this study can be freely downloaded through: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4765150.v

Children’s Use of Retreats in Family Child Care Homes

The use of retreat spaces by 65 children in 9 family child care homes was assessed in this study. Family child care providers used daily diaries to collect information about children’s retreat frequency and associated behavior. The findings revealed that nearly half of the children used informal, readily available retreats during the research period. Playing with toys was the most frequent and stable retreat activity across age groups. Yet the number of passive and engaged behaviors varied based on child characteristics such as age, gender, and child’s mood for the day. Retreat use can be viewed as a potentially adaptive environmental strategy that children apply as their needs change in a given day and from one developmental period to the next. Thus, it is recommended that child care professionals provide access to retreats and support children’s varied use of retreat space

Culture-based artefacts to inform ICT design: foundations and practice

Cultural aspects frame our perception of the world and direct the many different ways people interact with things in it. For this reason, these aspects should be considered when designing technology with the purpose to positively impact people in a community. In this paper, we revisit the foundations of culture aiming to bring this concept in dialogue with design. To inform design with cultural aspects, we model reality in three levels of formality: informal, formal, and technical, and subscribe to a systemic vision that considers the technical solution as part of a more complex social system in which people live and interact. In this paper, we instantiate this theoretical and methodological view by presenting two case studies of technology design in which culture-based artefacts were employed to inform the design process. We claim that as important as including issues related to culture in the ICT design agenda—from the conception to the development, evaluation, and adoption of a technology—is the need to support the design process with adequate artefacts that help identifying cultural aspects within communities and translating them into sociotechnical requirements. We argue that a culturally informed perspective on design can go beyond an informative analysis, and can be integrated with the theoretical and methodological framework used to support design, throughout the entire design process

Internet innovations:exploring new horizons

The aim of this paper is to provide a standpoint on an emerging trend in sharing digital video content over the Internet. The paper is based on participative evaluative analysis of business model employed by digital video content sharing providers. The authors have found that because of wide diffusion of broadband and cheap video recording equipment, enabling digital video content to be shared online, and emerging business internet video sharing practice its users increasingly find themselves infringing the intellectual property rights of others. This has implications for anyone using online video resources. The paper offers an insight into the increasing popularity of online video and the resulting dilemmas encountered by internet researchers; it also offers a functional way for researchers, businesses and online users to understand the mechanism of infringement of the intellectual property rights relating to online video content. The paper further contributes to expanding the understanding of internet users behaviour in relation to digital video content creation and distribution in the context of challenges faced by cyberlaw