It has been a while, but a lot has happened in my life. The biggest thing that happened is that I got a new job. Starting August 15th, I will be an assistant professor (tenure-track) at Michigan State University. I have a joint appointment in the Department of Telecommunications, Information Studies, and Media, [...]
The most basic problem that any social media system faces is contribution; the system needs contributions from its users. These contributions are usually in the form of some type of information: text, images, videos, etc. The fact that these contributions come from end users is what makes these systems social media. For most systems, users [...]
Tagged minimum thresholdGiving users a private, individual reason to contribute to social media can be a powerful incentive to induce contributions. Del.icio.us motivates users to create bookmarks by making them available on the Internet from anywhere and by helping users to organize their bookmarks with tags. These bookmarks are then shared with other users as a side [...]
Tagged side effectsOne of the difficulties in understanding why people contribute to social computing systems is that each person is not acting alone. One person’s decision is potentially affected by everyone else on the site, and everyone else’s decision is in turn potentially affected by that one person’s decision. For example, I sometimes write messages on Facebook [...]
Tagged side effects