Cultural impacts on web: An empirical comparison of interactivity in websites of South Korea and the United Kingdom

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis thesis explores cultural differences on interactive design features used in websites of South Korea and the United Kingdom from the perspective of both: professional website designers and end-users. It also investigates how the use of interactive design features from different cultures change over time. Four interaction types on websites; User to Interface (U2I), User to Content (U2C), User to Provider (U2P), and User to User (U2U) interactivity, and three interaction types on blogs; Blogger to Interface (B2I), Blogger to Content (B2C) and Blogger to Blogger (B2B) interactivity have been identified. Four cultural dimensions were used for the theoretical base of this study based on which four hypotheses were proposed in relation to the interaction types identified above; (a) High versus Low Context cultures for U2I, (b) High versus Low Uncertainty Avoidance for U2C, (c) High versus Low Power Distance for U2P and (d) Individualism versus Collectivism for U2U interactivity, in order to discover the effects of national cultures on interactivity in websites. We derived our own interactivity dimensions and mapped them to the four interaction types for websites and three for blogs. Interactive design features were derived from interactivity dimensions and examined in our studies. The findings revealed that there have been some changes towards homogeneity in the use of interactive design features on charity websites between South Korea and United Kingdom although there is still evidence of some cultural differences. With regard to end-users’ perspective, the result show that the use of interactive design features of blogs may be influenced by culture but this is only within a certain context. The findings also provide a valuable indication that users interacting within the same blog service can be considered as being shared concerns rather than shared national location, thus create a particular type of community in which bloggers are affected by social influence so they adopt a shared set of value, preferences and style that would indicate almost a common social culture. As a result, the cultural differences derived from their country of origin do not have that much impact

I Know Why You Went to the Clinic: Risks and Realization of HTTPS Traffic Analysis

Revelations of large scale electronic surveillance and data mining by governments and corporations have fueled increased adoption of HTTPS. We present a traffic analysis attack against over 6000 webpages spanning the HTTPS deployments of 10 widely used, industry-leading websites in areas such as healthcare, finance, legal services and streaming video. Our attack identifies individual pages in the same website with 89% accuracy, exposing personal details including medical conditions, financial and legal affairs and sexual orientation. We examine evaluation methodology and reveal accuracy variations as large as 18% caused by assumptions affecting caching and cookies. We present a novel defense reducing attack accuracy to 27% with a 9% traffic increase, and demonstrate significantly increased effectiveness of prior defenses in our evaluation context, inclusive of enabled caching, user-specific cookies and pages within the same website

Content dimensions of web advertising: A cross-national comparison between United States and Thailand

The purpose of this study was to determine whether and how web advertising differs across countries of diverse cultures (between U.S. and Thailand) in such areas as creative appeal used, the amount and type of information contained, and selected descriptive characteristics that are unique to this relatively new medium

The Expectation Gap in Internet Financial Reporting: Evidence from an Emerging Capital Market

The development of the internet as a global medium has significantly impacted financial reporting environment of the companies. Recently, companies have started reporting their financial results and other information relating to business on their web pages. The internet offers the facility to provide all interested groups with information to make well-informed, timely investment decision thus reducing the information advantages of institutional investors and information intermediaries. This study examines the level of internet financial reporting in Turkey. Furthermore, it tries to find out whether there is an expectation gap in internet financial reporting. In this study, “expectation gap” refers to the difference between (1) what financial statement users perceive important in decision making process to be and (2) what companies actually disclose or present in their web pages. Our findings indicate that an expectation gap exists; financial statement users have higher expectations for various facets than what companies actually report in the areas such as; reports of analysts, phone number to investor relations, segmental reporting, financial data in processable format, and summary of financial data. Our findings serve as evidence that the companies should engage in appropriate actions to reduce this expectation gap.Internet, Financial Reporting, Turkey

Specialised Languages and Multimedia. Linguistic and Cross-cultural Issues

none2noThis book collects academic works focusing on scientific and technical discourse and on the ways in which this type of discourse appears in or is shaped by multimedia products. The originality of this book is to be seen in the variety of approaches used and of the specialised languages investigated in relation to multimodal and multimedia genres. Contributions will particularly focus on new multimodal or multimedia forms of specialised discourse (in institutional, academic, technical, scientific, social or popular settings), linguistic features of specialised discourse in multimodal or multimedia genres, the popularisation of specialised knowledge in multimodal or multimedia genres, the impact of multimodality and multimediality on the construction of scientific and technical discourse, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of language, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of translation, new multimedia modes of knowledge dissemination, the translation/adaptation of scientific discourse in multimedia products. This volume contributes to the theory and practice of multimodal studies and translation, with a specific focus on specialized discourse.Rivista di Classe A - Volume specialeopenManca E., Bianchi F.Manca, E.; Bianchi, F

GAUGING PUBLIC INTEREST FROM SERVER LOGS, SURVEYS AND INLINKS

As the World Wide Web (the Web) has turned into a full-fledged medium to disseminate news, it is very important for journalism and information science researchers to investigate how Web users access online news reports and how to interpret such usage patterns. This doctoral thesis collected and analyzed Web server log statistics, online surveys results, online reprints of the top 50 news reports, as well as external inlinks data of a leading comprehensive online newspaper (the People’s Daily Online) in China, one of the biggest Web/information markets in today’s world. The aim of the thesis was to explore various methods to gauge the public interest from a Webometrics perspective. A total of 129 days of Web server log statistics, including the top 50 Chinese and English news stories with the highest daily pageview numbers, the comments attracted by these news items and the emailed frequencies of the same stories were collected from October 2007 to September 2008. These top 50 news items’positions on the Chinese and English homepages and the top 50 queries submitted to the website search engine of the People’s Daily Online were also retrieved. Results of the two online surveys launched in March 2008 and March 2009 were collected after their respective closing dates. The external inlinks to the People’s Daily Online were retrieved by Yahoo! (Chinese and English versions), and the online reprints were retrieved by Google. Besides the general usage patterns identified from the top 50 news stories, this study, by conducting statistical tests on the data sets, also reveals the following findings. First, the editors’ choices and the readers’ favorites do not always match each other; thus content of news title is more important than its homepage position in attracting online visits. Second, the Chinese and English readers’ interests in the same events are different. Third, the pageview numbers and comments posted to the news items reflect the unfavorable attitudes of the Chinese people toward the United States and Japan, which might offer us a method to investigate the public interest in some other issues or nations after necessary modifications. More importantly, some publicly available data, such as the comments posted to the news stories and online survey results, further show that the pageview measure does reflect readers’ interests/needs truthfully, as proved by the strong correlations between the top news reports and relevant top queries. The external ininks to the news websites and the online reprints of the top news items help us examine readers\u27 interests from other perspectives, as well as establish online profiles of the news websites. Such publicly accessible information could be an alternative data source for researchers to study readers\u27 interests when the Web server log data are not available. This doctoral thesis not only shows the usefulness of Web server log statistics, survey results, and other publicly accessible data in studying Web user’s information needs, but also offers practical suggestions for online news sites to improve their contents and homepage designs. However, no single method can draw a complete picture of the online news readers’ interests. The above mentioned research methodologies should be employed together, in order to make more comprehensive conclusions. Future research is especially needed to investigate the continuously rapid growth of the “Mobile News Readers,” which poses both challenges and opportunities to the press industry in the 21st century

GAUGING PUBLIC INTEREST FROM SERVER LOGS, SURVEYS AND INLINKS A Multi-Method Approach to Analyze News Websites

As the World Wide Web (the Web) has turned into a full-fledged medium to disseminate news, it is very important for journalism and information science researchers to investigate how Web users access online news reports and how to interpret such usage patterns. This doctoral thesis collected and analyzed Web server log statistics, online surveys results, online reprints of the top 50 news reports, as well as external inlinks data of a leading comprehensive online newspaper (the People\u27s Daily Online) in China, one of the biggest Web/information markets in today\u27s world. The aim of the thesis was to explore various methods to gauge the public interest from a Webometrics perspective. A total of 129 days of Web server log statistics, including the top 50 Chinese and English news stories with the highest daily pageview numbers, the comments attracted by these news items and the emailed frequencies of the same stories were collected from October 2007 to September 2008. These top 50 news items’positions on the Chinese and English homepages and the top 50 queries submitted to the website search engine of the People’s Daily Online were also retrieved. Results of the two online surveys launched in March 2008 and March 2009 were collected after their respective closing dates. The external inlinks to the People’s Daily Online were retrieved by Yahoo! (Chinese and English versions), and the online reprints were retrieved by Google. Besides the general usage patterns identified from the top 50 news stories, this study, by conducting statistical tests on the data sets, also reveals the following findings. First, the editors’ choices and the readers’ favorites do not always match each other; thus content of news title is more important than its homepage position in attracting online visits. Second, the Chinese and English readers’ interests in the same events are different. Third, the pageview numbers and comments posted to the news items reflect the unfavorable attitudes of the Chinese people toward the United States and Japan, which might offer us a method to investigate the public interest in some other issues or nations after necessary modifications. More importantly, some publicly available data, such as the comments posted to the news stories and online survey results, further show that the pageview measure does reflect readers’ interests/needs truthfully, as proved by the strong correlations between the top news reports and relevant top queries. The external ininks to the news websites and the online reprints of the top news items help us examine readers\u27 interests from other perspectives, as well as establish online profiles of the news websites. Such publicly accessible information could be an alternative data source for researchers to study readers\u27 interests when the Web server log data are not available. This doctoral thesis not only shows the usefulness of Web server log statistics, survey results, and other publicly accessible data in studying Web user’s information needs, but also offers practical suggestions for online news sites to improve their contents and homepage designs. However, no single method can draw a complete picture of the online news readers’ interests. The above mentioned research methodologies should be employed together, in order to make more comprehensive conclusions. Future research is especially needed to investigate the continuously rapid growth of the “Mobile News Readers,” which poses both challenges and opportunities to the press industry in the 21st century

A proposed marketing strategy for GO2HK.COM

Within these few years, the Internet becomes popular in the world. There are many well-known websites, such as the eBay, Amazon and Yahoo, etc.. In foreign countries, Web auction is very famous for the Internet users in foreign countries, while it is a new kind of electronic business in Hong Kong. The trend of web auction has penetrated into Hong Kong in this few years, but it is still at a growth stage of the industry life cycle. Web auction seems to be a new type of business in electronic commerce, thus it can attract the people to participate it in future. The potential market for web auction is quite large. In Hong Kong, there are four major companies that work on the business of web auction. They are the (1) Red-dots, (2) Go2hk, (3) Yahoo and (4) Clubciti. Whereas, go2hk is the smallest company in terms of company size, it is the second in terms of the number of registered users. The industry is growing rapidly and facing a keen competition. Therefore, the company needs to have good marketing mix strategies to establish its brand name. This project aims to purpose an appropriate marketing strategy of GO2HK.COM, which can allow the company to match the consumer needs with marketing strategy. Interviews are conducted and questionnaire surveys are initiated to look into the most preferable strategy for GO2HK. Before doing the questionnaire survey, we have interviewed the company, in order to identify the current marketing mix first. After that, questionnaire surveys are used to access the information about the procedure of non-users, sellers and bidders. Based on the findings, a proposed marketing strategy is recommended for go2hk. To conclude, security is the most critical aspect that both users and non-users are highly concerned

Academic visual identity of higher education institutions : a multimodal communication through pictorial representations

Empirical studies on branding of higher education institutions have increasingly explored the notion of identity in the modern university context. The positive effects of brand communication, especially offline communication, may be well investigated, whereas few studies have analyzed how online brand communication can be realized. This study examines an under-discovered visual source, namely pictures, that performs a pivotal function to display the visual identity of Chinese universities. This study investigates the multimodal discourse of the ‘About Us’ web genre which employs pictures to portray the universities’ brand identity, and examines their meaning potentials. Drawing upon the visual grammar framework of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), the sample for visual analysis in this study was collected from the ‘About Us’ webpages of nine elite Chinese universities (C9 League). Findings of the qualitative analysis indicate that pictures are ingeniously employed to display the virtual identity of the Chinese universities. The multifaceted brand identity of the universities may be projected through a heavy use of symbolic representations, along with a diversity of communication strategies to portray their representational meanings. The study provides information for universities to effectively use visual resources in constructing their brand identities and offering information to their target audience via the web-mediated multimodal discourses

The Impact of Electronic Shopping Site\u27s Privacy Policy, Reputation, and Trust on Customers\u27 Purchase Intentions

With the advent of EC, Internet shopping becomes a way of business transactions. This research investigates how trust can affect customers’ purchase intentions. Having surveyed related literature, a conceptual framework has been proposed. The framework consists of four components: independent variables (privacy policy and reputation), intervening variables (cognitive and affective trust), dependent variable (customers’ purchase intentions), and moderating variable (perceived risk). The 2(with/without privacy policy)*2(good/bad reputation) experiments are employed to collect primary data to validate the proposed conceptual framework. The two levels privacy policy and reputation can significantly influence cognitive and affective trust. Moreover, the effect of cognitive trust and purchase intentions is more than that of affective trust. The study result also shows the interaction between privacy policy, reputation, and trust for the major product is not significant. Therefore, we suggest that electronic shopping sites’ managers should consider customers’ mentality in order to raise their purchase intentions