Exploring contributions of public resources in social bookmarking systems

Our study examines whether users’ contributions of public resources to social bookmarking sites are circumstantial (a side effect of bookmarking for oneself), or motivational (intentional bookmarking for others). We develop a research model based on these two explanations and test it using survey data from users of two bookmarking sites. Our results suggest that public contributions are mainly driven by intentional bookmarking of resources for other users. In addition, we found that users deliberately bookmark resources for others when they believe that their bookmarks are valuable to other users and when they perceive that other users are contributing as well.     

Supporting collaborative hierarchical classification: Bookmarks as an example

Bookmarks (or favorites, hotlists) are popular strategies to relocate interesting websites on the WWW by creating a personalized URL repository. Most current browsers offer a facility to locally store and manage bookmarks in a hierarchy of folders; though, with growing size, users reportedly have trouble to create and maintain a stable organization structure. This paper presents a novel collaborative approach to ease bookmark management, especially the “classification” of new bookmarks into a folder. We propose a methodology to realize the collaborative classification idea of considering how similar users have classified a bookmark. A combination of nearest-neighbor-classifiers is used to derive a recommendation from similar users on where to store a new bookmark. A prototype system called CariBo has been implemented as a plugin for the central bookmark server software SiteBar. All findings have been evaluated on a reasonably large scale, real user dataset with promising results, and possible implications for shared and social bookmarking systems are discussed.     

Categorizing commercial products for customer oriented online retailing

Online retailing can offer several benefits. In order to realize these benefits, a commercial web site needs to ameliorate its deficiencies due to the absence of actual physical products. Although the use and popularity of the Internet continues to increase, it is still unclear how online retailers can establish effective online retailing strategies to capitalize on their benefits. For this clarification, this paper proposes a framework to categorize products according to consumers’ involvement and information quality fitness. Involvement refers to the degree of psychological identification or emotional ties consumers have with a particular product. Information quality fitness refers to the extent to which a product can fit with shopper’s requirements for online information. Thirty-six commercial products are empirically tested. It is found that products can be grouped into four categories such as ‘complex,’ ‘intelligent,’ ‘light,’ and ‘simple.’ This categorization can help understand product characteristics when they are sold via the Internet. Our finding implies that online retailers need to formulate their retailing strategies in view of these product categories.     

Surfing the web - Recreation or resource? Exploring how young people in the UK use the Internet as an advice portal for problems with a legal dimension

Internet use and access in the UK has increased rapidly in the last decade, with the concept of ‘information superhighway’ recognised as an axiom of Internet technology. Despite this, few studies have sought to investigate the incidence of use of the Internet as an advice resource outside of the health information arena. With an increasing impetus in the public sector towards the provision of online delivery mechanisms for civic orientated activities, including advice provision, it is timely to better understand the appropriateness of online advice seeking. Focusing on young people aged between 18 and 24 years, we investigated how much the Internet was used to obtain information about everyday problems with a legal dimension, who used it, how it was used and how successful respondents were in searching for information online. Data were extracted from a large-scale household survey of adults’ experience of problems with a legal dimension conducted across England and Wales (10,512 adult respondents). Results revealed significant growth in the use of the Internet to obtain information about such problems, rising from 4% in 2001 to around 18% in 2008. The responses of the 18-24 year olds to the survey illustrated that despite having comparatively high levels of Internet access, this age group utilised it to a lesser degree than similarly ‘connected’ age cohorts, and were less successful when doing so. This study highlights aspects of the second digital divide, going beyond access to explore use and outcomes of use. Implications for the future of the Internet in providing information and advice for young people, are discussed.     

ComPLuS model: A new insight in pupils’ collaborative talk, actions and balance during a computer-mediated music task

This exploratory work describes and analyses the collaborative interactions that emerge during computer-based music composition in the primary school. The study draws on socio-cultural theories of learning, originated within Vygotsky’s theoretical context, and proposes a new model, namely Computer-mediated Praxis and Logos under Synergy (ComPLuS). In this model, peers’ dialogue is categorised into five types; disputational, cumulative, exploratory, operational, and reflective, with each one corresponding to different types of spoken contributions. Moreover, peers’ actions are categorised as individual or joint and are used to evaluate the effect of computer mediation on the collaborative activity and its balance within a pair. The potential and effectiveness of the realisation of the ComPLuS model in practice, as far as peers’ collaboration is concerned, are evaluated from its trialling in an experimental case-study, in which a group of 11-yr old pupils worked in pairs to compose short melodies using computers at the computer room of their school. Emphasis was placed upon the types of social modes of thinking with regard to pupils’ spoken contributions and talk types during their conversation; pupils’ actions when manipulating software, and the balance of talk and action between the pair members. Their ongoing peer-to-peer communication and actions formed the research data. A mixed (qualitative and quantitative) analysis revealed that peers usually adopted cumulative and exploratory talk. Moreover, the action type which dominated their work was based on a consensual decision. Nevertheless, it was found that lead on collaborative talk does not mean lead on joint action and does not always sustain a balance in peers’ collaboration. Experimentation with the music software, in conjunction with pupils’ musical background, facilitated their joint action, exploratory and reflective talk. However, audio feedback provided by the software did not seem to affect peers’ talk types. These results suggest that the ComPLuS model captures the characteristics of peers’ collaborative interactions during their shared discussions and actions, and can lead to a better understanding of the nature of computer-supported collaborative creativity in primary music education.     

Searching the Web for conflicting topics: Page and user factors

Web users tend to search only the pages displayed at the top of the search engine results page (the ‘top link’ heuristic). Although it might be reasonable to use this heuristic to navigate simple and unambiguous facts, it might be risky when searching for conflicting socio-scientific topics, such as potential measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the present study, we explored the extent to which students consider other Web page characteristics, such as topic relevance and trustworthiness, when searching and bookmarking pages concerning a conflicting topic. We also examined the extent to which prior background knowledge moderates students’ behavior. The results revealed that while the study participants actually used a ‘top link’ heuristic to navigate the results, they engaged in more systematic processes to bookmark pages for further study. Furthermore, the students’ background knowledge was related to the assessment of Web page trustworthiness. We discuss these results from the perspective of a dual-processing model.     

Implicit bookmarking: Improving support for revisitation in within-document reading tasks

We explore improving support for revisitation in documents by automatically generating bookmarks based on users' reading history. After showing that dwell time and number of visits are not appropriate for predicting revisitations in documents, we model the high-level reading task as a sequence of reading blocks and recognize long-distance scrolls as separators between them. A long-distance scroll is defined as a continuous scrolling action which causes the document to be navigated beyond a one-page distance. We propose a new technique, called the Head–Tail (HT) algorithm, to generate bookmarks at the head and the tail of reading blocks, whose validity is quantitatively verified by log data analysis. Two studies were conducted to investigate this HT implicit bookmarking technique. The first is a controlled experiment that compared the HT algorithm to the widely used simple recency algorithm for generating implicit bookmarks, in terms of revisit coverage ability and distance between bookmarks. Results showed the HT algorithm to be superior in both measures. The second is a more ecologically valid study that investigated implicit bookmarking performance in real reading tasks, using Adobe Reader integrated with our implicit bookmarking technique. Results showed that our technique covered 85.1% of revisitations and saved users from 66.0% of long-distance scrolling actions. We end with a discussion of how to encourage users to use implicit bookmarks.     

A study of the impacts of positive/negative feedback on collective wisdom—case study on social bookmarking sites

The core spirit for web 2.0 is collective wisdom (i.e., the contribution of users, and the creation of value through the interaction between users). Social bookmarking sites integrate all kind of contents on the Internet (especially those generated by users), and play the role of pivot between content production and consumption. This paper mainly investigates how the positive/negative feedbacks would impact the quality of the collective wisdom within the autonomous service environments (i.e., the social bookmarking sites). Our research findings show that the performance of social bookmarking sites has a tradeoff between collective filtering (i.e., results of positive feedbacks) and front page update frequency that should be carefully managed for ensuring the good quality in collective wisdom and service performance. Moreover, the negative feedback could also shape the collective wisdom and stabilize the system performance. The research findings are believed to provide some managerial guidelines for web 2.0 sites design and operations.     

Internet anxiety: An empirical study of the effects of personality,beliefs, and social support

We examined sources of Internet anxiety; specifically modeling the ties from broad dispositional traits (computer anxiety, computer self-efficacy, and personal innovativeness with IT), beliefs about the work environment (about the adequacy of resources and trust in technology), and two forms of social support for IT (leader and peer support) to individuals’ anxiety about using Internet applications. We tested our model using respondents who participated in virtual teams during a 16-week period. Our findings suggested that Internet anxiety was affected both by the users’ personality and by beliefs that can be influenced by providing adequate resources to support the technology, encourage trust in technology, and working to assure users that leaders and peers are supportive of their using the technology. Our findings suggest that by providing appropriate resources and fostering a supportive environment, leaders could reduce Internet anxiety and thus influence the use of technology in the workplace in ways that benefit organizations.     

A five-year study of on-campus Internet use by undergraduate biomedical students

This paper reports on a five-year study (2005–2009) of biomedical students’ on-campus use of the Internet. Internet usage logs were used to investigate students’ sessional use of key websites and technologies. The most frequented sites and technologies included the university’s learning management system, Google, email and Facebook. Email was the primary method of electronic communication. However, its use declined over time, with a steep drop in use during 2006 and 2007 appearing to correspond with the rapid uptake of the social networking site Facebook. Both Google and Wikipedia gained in popularity over time while the use of other key information sources, including the library and biomedical portals, remained low throughout the study. With the notable exception of Facebook, most ‘Web 2.0’ technologies attracted little use. The ‘Net Generation’ students involved in this study were heavy users of generalist information retrieval tools and key online university services, and prefered to use externally hosted tools for online communication. These and other findings have important implications for the selection and provision of services by universities.     

TREPPS: A Trust-based Recommender System for Peer Production Services

Peer production, a new mode of production, is gradually shifting the traditional, capital-intensive wealth production to a model which heavily depends on information creating and sharing. More and more online users are relying on this type of services such as news, articles, bookmarks, and various user-generated contents around World Wide Web. However, the quality and the veracity of peers’ contributions are not well managed. Without a practical means to assess the quality of peer production services, the consequence is information-overloading. In this study, we present a recommender system based on the trust of social networks. Through the trust computing, the quality and the veracity of peer production services can be appropriately assessed. Two prominent fuzzy logic applications – fuzzy inference system and fuzzy MCDM method are utilized to support the decision of service choice. The experimental results showed that the proposed recommender system can significantly enhance the quality of peer production services and furthermore overcome the information overload problems. In addition, a trust-based social news system is built to demonstrate the application of the proposed system.     

Designing motivational agents: The role of praise, social comparison, and embodiment in computer feedback

The present study draws on theories of attribution, social comparison, and social facilitation to investigate how computers might use principles of motivation and persuasion to provide user feedback. In an online experiment, 192 participants performed a speed-reading task. The independent variables included whether or not the verbal feedback from the computer involved praise, whether the objective feedback showed that the participants were performing better or worse from their peers, and whether or not the feedback was presented by an on-screen agent. The main dependent variables included a subjective measure of participants’ intrinsic motivation and an objective measure of their task persistence. Results showed that providing participants with praise or comparative information on others’ performance improved intrinsic motivation. When praised, participants whose performances were comparatively low persisted in the task longer than those whose performances were comparatively high did. Additionally, the mere presence of an embodied agent on the screen increased participants’ motivation. Together, these results indicate that praise and social comparison can serve as effective forms of motivational feedback and that humanlike embodiment further improves user motivation.     

Offset tool-path linking for pocket machining

For die-cavity pocketing, contour-parallel offset (CPO) machining is the most popular machining strategy. CPO tool-path generation for pocketing includes geometrical and technological issues: (1) a 2D-curve offsetting algorithm; and (2) optimizing technological objectives, such as tool-path linking. The 2D-curve offsetting solution has been widely studied, because it has so many potential applications. However, though the tool-path linking may seriously affect the machining performance, there have been few reported investigations on optimizing the CPO tool-path linking. This paper presents a CPO tool-path linking procedure optimizing technological objectives, such as dealing with islands (positive and negative) and minimizing tool retractions, drilling holes and slotting. Main features of the proposed algorithm are as follows: (1) a data structure, called a ‘TPE-net’, is devised to provide information on the parent/child relationships among the tool-path-elements; (2) the number of tool retractions is minimized by a ‘tool-path-element linking algorithm’ finding a tour through the TPE-net; and (3) the number of drilling holes is minimized by making use of the concept of the ‘free space’ (negative islands or already machined region).     

Strategies of parental regulation in the media-rich home

This paper investigates practices of domestic regulation of media within the family, focusing on parental attempts to manage children’s access to and use of new media. Theoretically, the paper seeks to integrate the specific literature on domestic rules and regulation of media use with the broader literature on the rules and roles in social situations, arguing that parental strategies in relation to domestic media reveal both the enactment of and the negotiations over the typically informal and implicit rules and roles in family life. These issues are explored using data from two surveys: (1) the ‘Young People, New Media’ project surveyed 1300 children and their parents, examining the social, relational and contextual factors that shape the ways in which families develop rules for managing the introduction of the personal computer and the multiplication of television sets, among other new media changes, in the home; (2) the ‘UK Children Go Online’ project surveyed 1500 children and their parents, updating the picture by examining the introduction of the Internet into the family home. On the basis of these data, it is argued that despite the ‘newness’ of media as they successively arrive in the home, there are considerable consistencies over time in the responses of families, it being the slow-to-change relations between parents and children that shape patterns of domestic regulation and use.     

互联网个人信息挖掘模型设计

互联网个人信息挖掘技术是指综合利用搜索引擎、博客、网络社交平台等一系列互联网公开资源挖掘某个人物的个人信息。通过从互联网上海量信息中提取线索,寻找关联,最终获取所需信息。本文设计了一种互联网个人信息挖掘模型并详细介绍了其工作原理与应用,利用该模型所提供的方法可以有效进行互联网个人信息挖掘。     

Extracting viewer interests for automated bookmarking in video-on-demand services

Video-on-demand (VoD) services have become popular on the Internet in recent years. In VoD, it is challenging to support the VCR functionality, especially the jumps, while maintaining a smooth streaming quality. Previous studies propose to solve this problem by predicting the jump target locations and prefetching the contents. However, through our analysis on traces from a real-world VoD service, we find that it would be fundamentally difficult to improve a viewer’s VCR experience by simply predicting his future jumps, while ignoring the intentions behind these jumps. Instead of the prediction-based approach, in this paper, we seek to support the VCR functionality by bookmarking the videos. There are two key techniques in our proposed methodology. First, we infer and differentiate viewers’ intentions in VCR jumps by decomposing the interseek times, using an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, and combine the decomposed inter-seek times with the VCR jumps to compute a numerical interest score for each video segment. Second, based on the interest scores, we propose an automated video bookmarking algorithm. The algorithm employs the time-series change detection techniques of CUSUMandMB-GT, and bookmarks videos by detecting the abrupt changes on their interest score sequences. We evaluate our proposed techniques using real-world VoD traces from dozens of videos. Experimental results suggest that with our methods, viewers’ interests within a video can be precisely extracted, and we can position bookmarks on the video’s highlight events accurately. Our proposed video bookmarking methodology does not require any knowledge on video type, contents, and semantics, and can be applied on various types of videos.     

Multifactor hierarchical fuzzy trust evaluation on peer-to-peer networks

Decentralized Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks offer not only opportunities but also threats. Due to the autonomy, self-interest and heterogeneousness of peers, the interaction outcomes are uncertain. One way to minimize the threats in such an open environment is exploiting the reputation method to evaluate the trustworthiness and predict the future behaviors of peers. While most of the existing reputation-based trust models focus on preventing network from the malicious peers, peers’ capabilities to fulfill the tasks are mostly ignored. In this paper, we present a novel trust model MHFTrust which quantifies and compares the trustworthiness of peers based on hierarchical fuzzy system. Six capability factors are identified to describe the peers’ trust on the capability, and one security factor, named “Malicious behavior” is used to evaluate the peers’ trust on security. Our trust model consisted of local-trust computation based on fuzzy techniques and global reputation aggregation, which integrates feedback from other peers to produce a global reputation for each peer. Credibility and weight of feedback are introduced to facilitate the computation of global reputation. It is shown in simulation that our trust model greatly improves the efficiency of P2P system, while the number of inauthentic files on the network is significantly decreased.     

Internet addiction in adolescents: Prevalence and risk factors

As new media are becoming daily fare, Internet addiction appears as a potential problem in adolescents. From the reported negative consequences, it appears that Internet addiction can have a variety of detrimental outcomes for young people that may require professional intervention. Researchers have now identified a number of activities and personality traits associated with Internet addiction. This study aimed to synthesise previous findings by (i) assessing the prevalence of potential Internet addiction in a large sample of adolescents, and (ii) investigating the interactions between personality traits and the usage of particular Internet applications as risk factors for Internet addiction. A total of 3105 adolescents in the Netherlands filled out a self-report questionnaire including the Compulsive Internet Use Scale and the Quick Big Five Scale. Results indicate that 3.7% of the sample were classified as potentially being addicted to the Internet. The use of online gaming and social applications (online social networking sites and Twitter) increased the risk for Internet addiction, whereas extraversion and conscientiousness appeared as protective factors in high frequency online gamers. The findings support the inclusion of ‘Internet addiction’ in the DSM-V. Vulnerability and resilience appear as significant aspects that require consideration in further studies.     

A knowledge-practice perspective on technology-mediated learning

The purpose of the present paper is to examine the relations between Carl Bereiter’s and Marlene Scardamalia’s knowledge-building approach and social practices. It is argued that technology enhances learning through transformed social practices. In order to truly contribute to educational transformation, pedagogical approaches have to be embedded in locally cultivated “knowledge practices” that channel the participants’ intellectual efforts in a way that elicits collective advancement of knowledge. Consequently, knowledge advancement is not just about putting students’ ideas into the centre but depends on corresponding transformation of social practices of working with knowledge. Creation of cultures which advance knowledge presupposes sustained efforts of teacher-practitioners, collaborating with students and researchers, aimed at iteratively transforming prevailing knowledge practices toward more innovative ones.