The ability to utilize and benefit from today's explosion of social media sites depends on providing tools that allow users to productively participate. In order to participate, users must be able to find resources (both people and information) that they find valuable. Here, we argue that in order to do this effectively, we should make use of a user's "social context". A user's social context includes both their personal social context (their friends and the communities to which they belong) and their community social context (their role and identity in different communities).
Blog search has not yet reached its full potential. In this position paper, we suggest that more could be done to accommodate the task of finding good blogs to read, especially with respect to matching a desired taste or style of writing. We propose a faceted navigation interface as a good starting point for blog and author search, and that search oriented around people and their writings will lend itself well to advanced interfaces. We also argue that blog search is probably best integrated with search on other forms of timely social media for the task of determining what is currently being thought about a particular topic.
This paper describes the starting points of how to design and build tools to help individual users track and monitor their presence on the web from the standpoints of individual privacy and identity monitoring. It concludes with an overview technological barriers and possible solutions for their resolution. Our design models represent facets of identity by tracking their mentions in text. It is intended to provide a basis for discussion on how to redress the information imbalance users are subjected to today, due to lack of overview of their own online traces.
Social tagging systems have become increasingly popular over the past years. Users' tagging practices have been little studied and understood so far. However, understanding tagging behaviour can contribute towards a thorough understanding of the tagging phenomenon from multiple perspectives. In the present paper, results of a comparative analysis of tag characteristics on the tagging platforms connotea.org (scientific articles), del.icio.us (bookmarks), flickr.com (photos), and youtube.com (videos) are presented. Results show that differences in tagging behaviour can be observed for different digital resource types. Finally, a short discussion of the possible implications of the results for the design of future tagging systems is presented.
Social bookmarking is the process through which users share tags for online resources like blogs with others. Such collaborative tags provide valuable metadata for retrieval systems. While the successes of collaborative tagging systems have been demonstrated by popular websites like Del.icio.us, these sites cover only a small fraction of the available blogs on the web. The vast majority of the blogs are not available on any collaborative tagging system and are often tagged only by the authors. This lack of coverage of collaborative tags is a considerable roadblock in using the tag metadata in a web scale information retrieval system. To solve this problem we propose and implement a system to automatically recommend collaborative tags for a blog. The automatically generated tags will help to surface the blogs by making them available on social book marking sites and allow them to be easily discovered and potentially further tagged by a wider population.
