909 research outputs found

    Quantifying Biases in Online Information Exposure

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    Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on online technologies such as search engines and social media may limit exposure to diverse points of view and make us vulnerable to manipulation by disinformation. In this paper, we mine a massive dataset of Web traffic to quantify two kinds of bias: (i) homogeneity bias, which is the tendency to consume content from a narrow set of information sources, and (ii) popularity bias, which is the selective exposure to content from top sites. Our analysis reveals different bias levels across several widely used Web platforms. Search exposes users to a diverse set of sources, while social media traffic tends to exhibit high popularity and homogeneity bias. When we focus our analysis on traffic to news sites, we find higher levels of popularity bias, with smaller differences across applications. Overall, our results quantify the extent to which our choices of online systems confine us inside "social bubbles."Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures, to appear in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST

    Social Information Processing in Social News Aggregation

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    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

    An Information Diffusion-Based Recommendation Framework for Micro-Blogging

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    Micro-blogging is increasingly evolving from a daily chatting tool into a critical platform for individuals and organizations to seek and share real-time news updates during emergencies. However, seeking and extracting useful information from micro-blogging sites poses significant challenges due to the volume of the traffic and the presence of a large body of irrelevant personal messages and spam. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation framework to overcome this problem. By analyzing information diffusion patterns among a large set of micro-blogs that play the role of emergency news providers, our approach selects a small subset as recommended emergency news feeds for regular users. We evaluate our diffusion-based recommendation framework on Twitter during the early outbreak of H1N1 Flu. The evaluation results show that our method results in more balanced and comprehensive recommendations compared to benchmark approaches

    Library Blogs and User Participation: A Survey about Comment Spam in Library Blogs

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    The purpose of this research is to identify and describe the impact of comment spam in library blogs. Three research questions guided the study: current level of commenting in library blogs; librarians' perception of comment spam; and techniques used to address the comment spam problem

    Profiling the Sport Blogosphere

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    The purpose of this study is to provide primary research regarding how sports blogs utilize the social media and generate revenue for their blog. This study begins with a literature review of the blogging world with a special emphasis on the sports sector of the blogosphere. The literature review is followed by a discussion of the research method of content analysis, which was employed to examine the selected sports blogs. Furthermore, recommendations are made concerning sampling methods and how future statistical sampling of the sports blogosphere could proceed to improve the representativeness of samples and data collection in this research topic

    Wiki: A Technology for Conversational Knowledge Management and Group Collaboration

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    Wikis (from wikiwiki, meaning fast in Hawaiian) are a promising new technology that supports conversational knowledge creation and sharing. A Wiki is a collaboratively created and iteratively improved set of web pages, together with the software that manages the web pages. Because of their unique way of creating and managing knowledge, Wikis combine the best elements of earlier conversational knowledge management technologies, while avoiding many of their disadvantages. This article introduces Wiki technology, the behavioral and organizational implications of Wiki use, and Wiki applicability as groupware and help system software. The article concludes that organizations willing to embrace the Wiki way with collaborative, conversational knowledge management systems, may enjoy better than linear knowledge growth while being able to satisfy ad-hoc, distributed knowledge needs

    Social media marketing in East Asia

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    In dieser Masterarbeit wird eine analytische Methode prĂ€sentiert, um das Social Media Marketing (SMM) Umfeld in Ostasien und die SMM Strategien von ostasiatischen Unternehmen der IT-Branche zu untersuchen und zu vergleichen. Die SMM AktivitĂ€ten von ausgewĂ€hlten Fallstudien werden verglichen, um festzustellen, ob ein sogenanntes „ostasiatisches Modell des SMM“ existiert oder nicht. Überdies analysiert der Autor, basierend auf aktuellen Ratgebern fĂŒr ökonomisch erfolgreiches SMM, wie wahrscheinlich der ökonomische Erfolg der Fallstudien bezĂŒglich ihrer SMM Konzepte sein wird. Um die Fragen dieser Masterarbeit zu beantworten, wird ein theoretischer Rahmen herangezogen, welcher auf den zugrundeliegenden Theorien des Web 2.0 und der Marketingkommunikation beruht. Da SMM ein neues und relativ unerforschtes Forschungsgebiet darstellt, wird, basierend auf den oben genannten Theorien, ein mögliches Modell zur Analyse der SMM AktivitĂ€ten vorgeschlagen. Im empirischen Teil dieser Arbeit werden dann die SMM AktivitĂ€ten von mehrerer Fallstudien miteinander verglichen. Diese Fallstudien umfassen die drei grĂ¶ĂŸten ostasiatischen Unternehmen der IT-Branche, gemessen an deren inlĂ€ndischen Marktanteilen. Diese drei Unternehmen sind Samsung Electronics in SĂŒdkorea, NEC in Japan und Lenovo in der Volksrepublik China. Da jedoch noch keine objektiven Methoden zur Messung von SMM Strategien existieren, dient ein amerikanisches Unternehmen, welches in derselben Branche tĂ€tig und bekannt fĂŒr seine erfolgreichen SMM Strategien ist, als Referenzfallstudie. Die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit zeigen, dass sich sowohl das SMM Umfeld als auch die Strategien der analysierten ostasiatischen Unternehmen in nahezu allen Belangen stark voneinander unterscheiden. Dies lĂ€sst sich hauptsĂ€chlich darauf zurĂŒckfĂŒhren, dass die Unternehmen in SĂŒdkorea und Japan grĂ¶ĂŸtenteils importierte Social Media Plattformen fĂŒr SMM AktivitĂ€ten benutzen, wĂ€hrend in der Volksrepublik China vorwiegend Plattformen inlĂ€ndischen Ursprungs verwendet werden. Die Gemeinsamkeiten aller drei ostasiatischen Unternehmen weisen in Summe zwar eine gewisse Tendenz auf, jedoch reichen diese nicht, um von einem „ostasiatischen Modell des SMM“ zu sprechen. Es stellt sich ĂŒberdies heraus, dass alle untersuchten Unternehmen ihren Schwerpunkt auf die Social Media Plattform „Microblogs“ legen und die Grundregeln der Ratgeber fĂŒr ökonomisch erfolgreiches SMM, wenn auch in unterschiedlichen Ausmaßen, befolgen. DarĂŒber hinaus zeigt sich, dass, im Gegensatz zur amerikanischen Referenzfallstudie, keines der ostasiatischen Unternehmen innerhalb der Social Media auf öffentliche Kritik reagiert und andere Anwender von Social Media bei seiner Produktentwicklung einbindet. BezĂŒglich der Reaktion auf öffentliche Kritik in Social Media schlĂ€gt der Autor eine mögliche ErklĂ€rung vor, welche auf dem kulturellen Konzept des „Gesicht verlierens“ basiert, das in den hier analysierten LĂ€ndern vorherrscht.This paper provides an analytical approach to assess and compare the East Asian social media marketing (SMM) environment and the strategies of East Asian businesses in the IT industry. SMM activities of selected case studies are compared to find out whether a so-called ‘East Asian way of SMM’ does exist or not. In addition, this paper will also analyze whether the SMM strategies of the East Asian businesses are likely to be economically successful according to the current guidelines on successful SMM. To answer these questions, the author chose a theoretical framework based on the underlying theories of Web 2.0 and marketing communications. Since SMM is a new and comparatively unexplored field of research, a possible model for analyzing SMM strategies is suggested. For the empirical data, a multiple case study approach was chosen. These case studies comprise the three biggest East Asian businesses from the IT industry in Korea, Japan and China, as measured by their domestic market shares, which are Samsung Electronics, NEC and Lenovo. However, due to the lack of objective measuring methods for SMM in some aspects, a US company of the same industry renowned for its SMM strategies served as a reference case study of this paper. The results of this paper show that the SMM environment and strategies of East Asian businesses differ in almost all aspects from each other. This is mainly due to the fact that in Korea and Japan imported social media platforms from overseas are used for SMM, whereas in China only domestic social media platforms are used. However, some similarities could be detected in the SMM channels and instruments used by the East Asian companies, which indicate a trend but are not enough to name it an ’East Asian way of SMM’. It turned out that all three case studies have a special focus on the social media channel microblogs and follow the basic rules of the guidelines on successful SMM. In addition, it was brought to light that, in contrast to the US counterpart, all East Asian companies neither show any open reaction to criticism nor openly try to integrate other users of social media in the development of its products. With regard to the reaction on criticism made public via social social media, we give a possible explanation, which is linked to the cultural concept of ‘losing face’ that is prevalent in Korea, Japan and China

    Controversy trend detection in social media

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    In this research, we focus on the early prediction of whether topics are likely to generate significant controversy (in the form of social media such as comments, blogs, etc.). Controversy trend detection is important to companies, governments, national security agencies, and marketing groups because it can be used to identify which issues the public is having problems with and develop strategies to remedy them. For example, companies can monitor their press release to find out how the public is reacting and to decide if any additional public relations action is required, social media moderators can moderate discussions if the discussions start becoming abusive and getting out of control, and governmental agencies can monitor their public policies and make adjustments to the policies to address any public concerns. An algorithm was developed to predict controversy trends by taking into account sentiment expressed in comments, burstiness of comments, and controversy score. To train and test the algorithm, an annotated corpus was developed consisting of 728 news articles and over 500,000 comments on these articles made by viewers from CNN.com. This study achieved an average F-score of 71.3% across all time spans in detection of controversial versus non-controversial topics. The results suggest that it is possible for early prediction of controversy trends leveraging social media

    Corporate Social Responsibilityin the Blogosphere

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    This paper uses social network analysis to examine the interaction between corporate blogs devoted to sustainability issues and the blogosphere, a clustered online network of collaborative actors. By analyzing the structural embeddedness of a prototypical blog in a virtual community, we show the potential of online platforms to document corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and to engage with an increasingly socially and ecologically aware stakeholder base. The results of this study show that stakeholder involvement via sustainability blogs is a valuable new practice for CSR communications and stakeholder engagement. It also opens new horizons for communicating CSR issues to key constituencies onlin
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