256 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
Information is not a Virus, and Other Consequences of Human Cognitive Limits
The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape
the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of
available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts
how people allocate their attention to social media content. As a consequence,
the position of information in an individual's social feed, as well as explicit
social signals about its popularity, determine whether it will be seen, and the
likelihood that it will be shared with followers. Accounting for these
cognitive limits simplifies mechanics of information diffusion in online social
networks and explains puzzling empirical observations: (i) information
generally fails to spread in social media and (ii) highly connected people are
less likely to re-share information. Studies of information diffusion on
different social media platforms reviewed here suggest that the interplay
between human cognitive limits and network structure differentiates the spread
of information from other social contagions, such as the spread of a virus
through a population.Comment: accepted for publication in Future Interne
User Participation in Social Media: Digg Study
The social news aggregator Digg allows users to submit and moderate stories
by voting on (digging) them. As is true of most social sites, user
participation on Digg is non-uniformly distributed, with few users contributing
a disproportionate fraction of content. We studied user participation on Digg,
to see whether it is motivated by competition, fueled by user ranking, or
social factors, such as community acceptance.
For our study we collected activity data of the top users weekly over the
course of a year. We computed the number of stories users submitted, dugg or
commented on weekly. We report a spike in user activity in September 2006,
followed by a gradual decline, which seems unaffected by the elimination of
user ranking. The spike can be explained by a controversy that broke out at the
beginning of September 2006. We believe that the lasting acrimony that this
incident has created led to a decline of top user participation on Digg.Comment: Workshops of 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web
Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT 07
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