43,627 research outputs found
Social Information Processing in Social News Aggregation
The rise of the social media sites, such as blogs, wikis, Digg and Flickr
among others, underscores the transformation of the Web to a participatory
medium in which users are collaboratively creating, evaluating and distributing
information. The innovations introduced by social media has lead to a new
paradigm for interacting with information, what we call 'social information
processing'. In this paper, we study how social news aggregator Digg exploits
social information processing to solve the problems of document recommendation
and rating. First, we show, by tracking stories over time, that social networks
play an important role in document recommendation. The second contribution of
this paper consists of two mathematical models. The first model describes how
collaborative rating and promotion of stories emerges from the independent
decisions made by many users. The second model describes how a user's
influence, the number of promoted stories and the user's social network,
changes in time. We find qualitative agreement between predictions of the model
and user data gathered from Digg.Comment: Extended version of the paper submitted to IEEE Internet Computing's
special issue on Social Searc
Social Capital in Boston: Findings From the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey
Highlights survey findings on the ways in which Bostonians connect and how these social networks benefit the entire community. Ranks community involvement in Boston, including politics, activism in the arts, and tolerance, among forty sites nationwide
Liquid FM: Recommending Music through Viscous Democracy
Most modern recommendation systems use the approach of collaborative
filtering: users that are believed to behave alike are used to produce
recommendations. In this work we describe an application (Liquid FM) taking a
completely different approach. Liquid FM is a music recommendation system that
makes the user responsible for the recommended items. Suggestions are the
result of a voting scheme, employing the idea of viscous democracy. Liquid FM
can also be thought of as the first testbed for this voting system. In this
paper we outline the design and architecture of the application, both from the
theoretical and from the implementation viewpoints
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