Media-User Typology (MUT) Identifies Five Types of Social...
User typesFrequency of useVariety of useTypical activityTypical platformStudiesOther labels
(1) Non-users
No use
No use
No
All
Largest of all user types
Non-Internet users, Off the net, Inactives, Non-users, Non-users, Anxiety,
(2) Sporadics
Low use
Low variety
No particular activity, low interest, newcomers
All
Found in 20 studies
Followers, Sporadics, Laggards, Confused and Adverse, Followers, Indifferents, Indifferent, Media Lite, Average users, Inexperienced experimenters, Risk-averse dou...
notesA table of different Social Media user types and their characteristics.
ToDo: Fixe white space style for this table.
The Internet is Fueled by Curiosity and Generosity
The Internet relies on our greed for knowledge and connections, but also on our astonishing online generosity. We show inordinate levels of altruism on the Internet, wasting hours on chat room sites giving advice to complete strangers, or contributing anonymously to Wikipedia just to enrich other people’s knowledge. There is no guarantee or expectation of reciprocation. Making friends and trusting strangers with personal information (be it your bank details or musical tastes) is an essentia...
1 It takes inquisitive minds to browse the Internet and generous minds to fill it with content.
Twitter, Celebrity, Asymmetric and Symmetric Social Conne...
Asymmetric attention is the key to another important concept, celebrity. Being famous means that a lot of people pay attention to you--after all, by definition it is famous people who appear on the cover of magazines, which are purchased because lots of people want to know what's happening with their favorite celebrities. But the celebrity doesn't, for the the most part, pay any attention to the fans (at least, not individually). Asymmetric attention ties in Twitter allows people like Oprah W...
3 Twitter provides for asymmetric connections, where individuals follow others, making the people who don't follow back are celebrities; however, the system has been hacked with @replies, which make asymmetric connections symmetrical.
The Web as a Liberal Artefact
A final point briefly worth making is that the Web is a space designed to let information flow, and to create opportunities for cooperation and collaboration. It is worth asking why freer information flow is a good thing, and the answers are pretty straightforward. It is good to have the freedom to express oneself in order that one can pursue one's own autonomous and authentic projects. Unhindered criticism of governments and other power centres tends to lead to better governance; information...With openess, egalitarianism of ideas, and free flow of information as its principles, the Web works as a liberal democracy, and totalitarian governments attempt to control or subvert it.
Natural Language Processing vs. Semantic Web
NLP works well statistically; the SW, in contrast, requires logic and doesn't yet make substantial use of statistics. Natural language is democratic, as expressed in the slogan 'meaning is use' (see Section 5.1 for more discussion of this). The equivalent in the SW of the words of natural language are logical terms, of which URIs are prominent. Thus we have an immediate disanalogy between NLP and the SW, which is that URIs, unlike words, have owners, and so can be regulated. That is not to sa... notesA short comparison of the difference between NLP and SW in terms of processing, algorithms, structure, and emergence. NLP is described as 'democratic', where the power of SW is that URIs 'have owners,' meaning they are a top-down construct. Perhaps this is the problem of the Semantic Web and why it may never catch on: the web favors emergent semantics and democratized development.
Ontologies vs. Folksonomies
It is argued - though currently the arguments are filtering only slowly into the academic literature - that folksonomies are preferable to the use of controlled, centralised ontologies [e.g. 259]. Annotating Web pages using controlled vocabularies will improve the chances of one's page turning up on the 'right' Web searches, but on the other hand the large heterogeneous user base of the Web is unlikely to contain many people (or organisations) willing to adopt or maintain a complex ontology. ... notesOntologies provide structure and a standard for tagging and searching, while folksonomies provide for an emergent system for tagging things.
The Importance of Time-Stamping to Relevance
Time-stamping is of interest because the temporal element of context is essential for understanding a text (to take an obvious example, when reading a paper on global geopolitics in 2006 it is essential to know whether it was written before or after 11th September, 2001). Furthermore, some information has a 'sell-by date': after a certain point it may become unreliable. Often this point isn't predictable exactly, but broad indications can be given; naturally much depends on whether the inform... notesTime-stamping is a crucial function of semantic data. Some information grows less accurate over time, while a context is desired for other data.
Assessing Trust, Subjective Logic, Real-Valued Triple
Another key factor in assessing the trustworthiness of a document is the reliability or otherwise of the claims expressed within it; metadata about provenance will no doubt help in such judgements but need not necessarily resolve them. Representing confidence in reliability has always been difficult in epistemic logics. In the context of knowledge representation approaches include: subjective logic, which represents an opinion as a real-valued triple (belief, disbelief, uncertainty) where the... notesNeed to follow up on these concepts, learn more about them for establishing the trustworthiness and quality of content.
The Web is More Than Text
Nevertheless, the next generation Web should not be based on the false assumption that text is predominant and keyword-based search will be adequate for all reasonable purposes [127]. Indeed, the issues relating to navigation through multimedia repositories such as video archives and through theWeb are not unrelated: both need information links to support browsing, and both need engines to support manual link traversal. However, the keyword approach may falter in the multimedia context becaus... notesAll of our search technologies, semantic explorations, and other online conversations are all dependent on text, but they must grow to be able to read images, audio, and video as well.
The Importance of Web Topology
Web topology contains more complexity than simple linear chains. In this section, we will discuss attempts to measure the global structure of the Web, and how individual webpages fit into that context. Are there interesting representations that define or suggest important properties? For example, might it be possible to map knowledge on theWeb? Such a map might allow the possibility of understanding online communities, or to engage in 'plume tracing' - following a meme, or idea, or rumour, or... notesMapping the web allows us to find patterns in it, with potential applications.
