The value of social search: Seeking collective personal experience in social Q&A

In this paper, we examine the value of social question‐answering (Q&A) services as a platform for social search. We present a quasi‐field study where we instructed 20 study participants to use a social Q&A service, Yahoo! Answers, for a period of one week, and interviewed them about their experience with Yahoo! Answers based on the questions (N=99) they posted to the site. The results indicate that participants turned to a social search system when they needed firsthand information, diverse perspectives, and others' value judgments. Participants also preferred social search systems over web search engines in situations where they could obtain tailored information, access original and non‐popular information, filter out information, and interact with real people. Various strategies that participants employed to ensure that their questions would be likely to be answered were also identified. This study contributes to the field of information science by investigating a social Q&A service using the framework of social search from the information seeker's perspective. The results have implications for developers and designers of social search systems.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106937/1/14505001067_ftp.pd

Credibility perceptions of content contributors and consumers in social media

This panel addresses information credibility issues in the context of social media. During this panel, participants will discuss people's credibility perceptions of online content in social media from the perspectives of both content contributors and consumers. Each panelist will bring her own perspective on credibility issues in various social media, including Twitter (Morris), Wikipedia (Metzger; Francke), blogs (Rieh), and social Q&A (Jeon). This panel aims to flesh out multi‐disciplinary approaches to the investigation of credibility and discuss integrated conceptual frameworks and future research directions focusing on assessing and establishing credibility in social media.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111174/1/meet14505101022.pd

Audience-aware credibility: From understanding audience to establishing credible blogs

This study examines how bloggers establish and enhance the credibility of their blogs through a series of blogging practices. Based on an analysis of interviews with 22 inde-pendent bloggers who blog on a range of topics, we present audience-aware credibility as a theoretical construct. Audi-ence-aware credibility is defined as how bloggers signal their credibility based on who they think their audience is and how they provide value to that perceived audience. The analysis of bloggers’ credibility constructs, conceptualizations of audience, and perceived blog value identified four types of bloggers who constructed audience-aware credibility in distinctive ways: Community Builder, Expertise Provider, Topic Synthesizer, and Information Filterer. We then report on these bloggers’ blogging practices for establishing credibility and strategies for interacting with their audience to enhance credibility. The contributions of this study are to expand credibility constructs for social media research and to demonstrate the role of credibility perceptions in content contributors’ online activities. The findings reveal that a multi-dimensional construct of audience-aware credibility serves as a driving factor influencing and shaping blogging practices of all four types of bloggers.MacArthur FoundationPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106426/1/Rieh_ICWSM2014_final_0324.pd

Answers from the Crowd: How Credible are Strangers in Social Q&A?

Individuals may encounter distinct kinds of challenges in assessing credibility in a social Q&A setting where they interact with strangers. It is necessary to better understand how people make credibility judgments when seeking information using social Q&A services because people increasingly use such services to obtain personalized answers from a large pool of unknown people. In this paper, we report preliminary findings from a quasi-field study where participants were asked to use Yahoo! Answers for one week and were interviewed afterwards. We find that participants' assessment of the credibility of strangers who answered their questions occurred in three different dimensions: attitude, trustworthiness, and expertise. Furthermore, different elements were noticed and interpreted in each dimension of the credibility assessment. Our work provides insights into source credibility assessment in social Q&A settings and implications for the design of social technologies that better support people's online credibility assessment.publishedye