Statistical Modelling of Information Sharing: Community, Membership and Content

File-sharing systems, like many online and traditional information sharing communities (e.g. newsgroups, BBS, forums, interest clubs), are dynamical systems in nature. As peers get in and out of the system, the information content made available by the prevailing membership varies continually in amount as well as composition, which in turn affects all peers' join/leave decisions. As a result, the dynamics of membership and information content are strongly coupled, suggesting interesting issues about growth, sustenance and stability. In this paper, we propose to study such communities with a simple statistical model of an information sharing club. Carrying their private payloads of information goods as potential supply to the club, peers join or leave on the basis of whether the information they demand is currently available. Information goods are chunked and typed, as in a file sharing system where peers contribute different files, or a forum where messages are grouped by topics or threads. Peers' demand and supply are then characterized by statistical distributions over the type domain. This model reveals interesting critical behaviour with multiple equilibria. A sharp growth threshold is derived: the club may grow towards a sustainable equilibrium only if the value of an order parameter is above the threshold, or shrink to emptiness otherwise. The order parameter is composite and comprises the peer population size, the level of their contributed supply, the club's efficiency in information search, the spread of supply and demand over the type domain, as well as the goodness of match between them.Comment: accepted in International Symposium on Computer Performance, Modeling, Measurements and Evaluation, Juan-les-Pins, France, October-200

Profiles of social networking sites users in the Netherlands

Online social networking has become a reality and integral part of the daily personal, social and business life. The extraordinary increase of the user numbers of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and the rampant creation of online communities presents businesses with many challenges and opportunities. From the commercial perspective, the SNS are an interesting and promising field: online social networks are important sources of market intelligence and also offer interesting options for co-operation, networking and marketing. For SMEs especially the Social Networking Sites represent a simple and low cost solution for listening the customer’s voice, reaching potential customers and creating extensive business networks. This paper presents the results of a national survey mapping the demographic, social and behavioral characteristics of the Dutch users of SNS. The study identifies four different user profiles and proposes a segmentation framework as basis for better understanding the nature and behavior of the participants in online communities. The findings present new insights to marketing strategists eager to use the communication potential of such communities; the findings are also interesting for businesses willing to explore the potential of online networking as a low cost yet very efficient alternative to physical, traditional networking

Exploring collaboration patterns among global software development teams.

This study examines communication behaviors in global software student teams. The authors of the paper characterize the types of communication behaviors that occur when student teams are engaged in a software development project. The authors present findings from a one-semester study that examined factors contributing to successful distributed programming interactions among students enrolled at the University of Atilim (Turkey), Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, University of North Texas, and Middlesex University (UK). Using content and cluster analyses techniques, we identified distinct patterns of collaboration and examined how these patterns were associated with task, culture, GPA, and performance of collaborative teams. Our results suggest that communication patterns among global software learners may be related to task type, culture and GPA. It is hoped that these findings will lead to the development of new strategies for improving communication among global software teams

How people find videos

At present very little is known about how people locate and view videos 'in the wild'. This study draws a rich picture of everyday video seeking strategies and video information needs, based on an ethnographic study of New Zealand university students. These insights into the participants' activities and motivations suggest potentially useful facilities for a video digital library

Solutions to Detect and Analyze Online Radicalization : A Survey

Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research shows that various platforms on the Internet (low barrier to publish content, allows anonymity, provides exposure to millions of users and a potential of a very quick and widespread diffusion of message) such as YouTube (a popular video sharing website), Twitter (an online micro-blogging service), Facebook (a popular social networking website), online discussion forums and blogosphere are being misused for malicious intent. Such platforms are being used to form hate groups, racist communities, spread extremist agenda, incite anger or violence, promote radicalization, recruit members and create virtual organi- zations and communities. Automatic detection of online radicalization is a technically challenging problem because of the vast amount of the data, unstructured and noisy user-generated content, dynamically changing content and adversary behavior. There are several solutions proposed in the literature aiming to combat and counter cyber-hate and cyber-extremism. In this survey, we review solutions to detect and analyze online radicalization. We review 40 papers published at 12 venues from June 2003 to November 2011. We present a novel classification scheme to classify these papers. We analyze these techniques, perform trend analysis, discuss limitations of existing techniques and find out research gaps

Harnessing Collaborative Technologies: Helping Funders Work Together Better

This report was produced through a joint research project of the Monitor Institute and the Foundation Center. The research included an extensive literature review on collaboration in philanthropy, detailed analysis of trends from a recent Foundation Center survey of the largest U.S. foundations, interviews with 37 leading philanthropy professionals and technology experts, and a review of over 170 online tools.The report is a story about how new tools are changing the way funders collaborate. It includes three primary sections: an introduction to emerging technologies and the changing context for philanthropic collaboration; an overview of collaborative needs and tools; and recommendations for improving the collaborative technology landscapeA "Key Findings" executive summary serves as a companion piece to this full report

Finding video on the web

At present very little is known about how people locate and view videos. This study draws a rich picture of everyday video seeking strategies and video information needs, based on an ethnographic study of New Zealand university students. These insights into the participants’ activities and motivations suggest potentially useful facilities for a video digital library