My research is all about how people use social media websites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and Delicious. In particular, I am really interesting in how the specific details of the design of these systems influences the way users behave when using these systems. In general, I try to look for what I call incentive mechanisms: patterns in the design of these sites that always lead to predictable user behavior. Too often current designers of these websites use wishful thinking when it comes to user behavior. “I’ll let people create tags and they will tag it with all kinds of useful words.” But when real people start using the system, they don’t quite use it in the way the designers imagined. I am trying to give designers to tools to that when the system really depends on being used in a specific way, they can know how to get people to actually use it that way.
I created this blog as a kind of research notebook. I hope to use it to chronicle my thoughts about the connection between the design of social computing systems and the resulting user behavior. I’ll include observations for real-world social computing systems with speculations about how users actually use them, and why that is. I’ll include summaries of my research and the research of other scholars that speaks to the design questions I am interested in. I will also occasionally try to include “big thoughts”: larger issues that are really important for the future understanding of computing. But overall, this blog is really just a way for me to stay focused on my long-term interest: building better social computing systems.