Social browsing vs. technology-enabled navigation
by Francois Gossieaux
While doing some searches on community related research papers on arXiv (the open scientific research paper archive at Cornell - an interesting experiment in itself) - I found this fascinating paper on Social Browsing on Flickr.
The research found that the contact lists is what forms the social network backbone of the site - and they call this new way in which people interact with information social browsing.
Apparently people use social browsing more so than searching for information using tags, groups, calendar, maps or any of the other ways through which Flickr offers users to search for subscribe to content.
Kristina Lerman, one of the researchers for this paper, also authored a paper on Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg - in which she also found that the friends list acts as the social filtering system and that the size of one’s friends lists plays a major role in promoting stories to the front page - potentially leading to a “tyranny of the minority” situation where a disproportionate number of front page stories comes from the same small group of interconnected users.
Links to both papers have been added to other stuff we read in the sidebar.
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[…] On someone’s blog today I saw a link to this blog post, Social browsing vs. technology-enabled navigation: The research found that the contact lists is what forms the social network backbone of the site - and they call this new way in which people interact with information social browsing. […]
[…] Thanks to my Friend Steve Cavrak for posting all those interesting finds to my del.icio.us feed. Yesterday I checked out an interesting article about Social Browsing. It made me think about the various ways we recieve information outside of just running to Google and going through the results. […]
[…] The Future of Communities Blog — Social browsing vs. technology-enabled navigation - The future of communities points us to an interesting academic research paper done analyzing behavior on Flickr. […]