Management and conflict

Choice a Online Community (OC)

In this session of study, I continued to use Mitbbs.com as my case study online community (OC). Mitbbs.com is a Chinese bulletin board system site. The majority of its users are overseas Chinese. Different from previous sessions, in this session, I used data collected from different forums on Mitbbs.com. Most of them exhibit similar governing rules. Some of them are imposed by the system, some of them are developed by the users over time, and some of them are originated from user contributions and have now become part of the official rules.

The Official Rules Governing the OC

Mitbbs.com provides a general set of rules that governs the site, and make these rules easily accessible to the users. These rule contain a wide range of guidelines. For instance in the “User Registration Obligations” section, it is stated the following.

1. Provide true and accurate information when registering in Unknown Space (Mitbbs.com).
2. Maintain and update registration information constantly to keep it true, accurate and current.
3. If Unknown Space suspects that registered information is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, Unknown Space has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service.
4. Unknown Space is concerned about the safety and privacy of all its users, particularly children. Children under age 14 are not allowed to register and visit Unknown Space without parents' or guardians' consents.

Another example of such rules for governing the site can be found in the “Member Conduct Agreements” section. Copied below is a list of such rules that users are supposed to follow.

1. do not violate any local laws and regulations of Unknown Space and of your location,
2. do not infringe other's intellectual property or property right,
3. do not reveal other's privacy and identity,
4. do not contain harmful, abusive, hateful and obscene language,
5. do not seduce minors or harm minors,
6. do not transmit or upload advertisements of any kind, promotional materials, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any other form of solicitation,
7. do not transmit or upload virus or do anything that may damage the operation of Unknown Space,
8. do not disrupt the order of Internet forum, chat room and other services,
9. do not forge information or mislead users and the public,
10. do not stalk another and store personal data of other users,

Mitbbs.com retains the right to remove or block any content under its sole discretion. The following link contain the full version of these rules.

http://www.mitbbs.com/tos.htm

The User Developed Rules Governing the OC

These are the rules specified by the system, although whether or not the users would always follow them is another story. Besides these rules, the users could form their own “governments” and the system provides the “governors” different levels of higher privileges. These “governors” are selected from a pool of volunteered candidates. Usually each forum has a “government” with three or four “governors”. 

For example, in the Mitbbs.com/CS forum, a veteran user who has shown a good knowledge in CS and has answered many questions would have a high rank and good “mileage” score. In other words, he would have a good chance in the “governor” election for the CS forum, assuming he would like to volunteer for that position. 

One example of a “governor's” power is that he could evaluate and decide a post is not appropriate for this forum and delete it without the permission from its author. Another example is that a “governor” could judge a particular user's behavior and restrict his rights to post if necessary, e.g., spam accounts.

Examples of Rules Been Broken.

There are many cases when the rules are broken but usually they are not reported or punished, as long as the user does not have bad intentions and this action does not cost any inconvenience of other uses.

-- True Identity --

One of the governing rules stated that the user are supposed to always provide true and accurate information when registering in Mitbbs.com, as well as maintain and update registration information constantly to keep it true, accurate and current. In reality, very few people are doing this. And many people have multiple accounts. For instance, for my study, I registered for an account and it is different from what I have previously. I just need to provide a different user name and email account to go through the validation check. Since these days many people have multiple email accounts, having fake identities is common and allowed implicitly.

If I were in the administration's position, I would approach this issue a little bit differently from how it is treated right now. Sine there is not way to stop people from registering for multiple accounts, the OC could be more strict about deleting accounts. Of course, this is only applicable for well-established OC that already has a large user base.

Basically, I would go for two criteria of removing accounts. The first criteria is for accounts that haven't been used for a long time. A very possible reason for this to happen is that the user registered multiple accounts for various reasons at one time and he would not be able to remember all of them and use all of them in a regular bases. The second criteria will be discussed with the following section.

-- No Advertisements --

Another rule stated that transmitting or uploading advertisements of any kind, promotional materials, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any other form of solicitation is not allowed. This rule is overall pretty strictly applied to each forum on Mitbbs.com. And it is done mostly by the forum “government” discussed in the previous section.

The screenshot above shows an example of the “governor's” power. The user with id “yidingjizhu” is volunteering for the leading “Governor” position in the Mitbbs.com/Pets forum. This indicates “yidingjizhu” is generally trusted by the other users due to his previous OC activities. He restricted the user with id “xiaopie” from posting any threads or comments on the Mitbbs.com/Pets forum for 14 days. This action is caused by the fact that “xiaopie” is suspected of abusing the forum for advertising purposes.

If I were in the administration's position, I would imposing a more strict rule for removing accounts. This is the second criteria following the previous section. Basically, I would attempt to remove an user account if it has violated rules and gotten punished for doing so repeatedly. Every time an account violates some rules, such as spamming, it would be punished by restricting reading or writing permissions. If a user has only one account then he would be very careful about committing inappropriate actions, since this would cause him not being able to use the OC. Only when the user has multiple accounts, he would not care about these punishments and hence not being careful with his actions.

-- Rating for Posts --

Just like Obfuscatocracy: A stakeholder analysis of governing documents for virtual worlds mentioned, the features provided by the SNSs are not always used as they are intended to. Some of them might get abused, and some other might get ignored. 

The rating system on Mitbbs.com is in the second category. This rating mechanism is similar to the Amazon rating system discussed in the How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities paper. Basically, when a user reads a post, he could comment on it and express his own opinion. But in many cases, the reader would not bother commenting if there's nothing special to say. This rating mechanism provides a way for a reader to still express his overall opinion by just one click on the “agree” or “disagree” button. This mechanism is not used at all on Mitbbs.com. In additions, the system can not prevent users from clicking the “agree” or “disagree” multiple times with their different OC identities. Overall, this feature is been ignored.

The screenshot above demonstrates this rating mechanism on Mitbbs.com. The “flower” button indicates agreement and the “foot” button indicates disagreement. As we see nobody rated this thread, although this thread itself attracted many responses and going through the responses I noticed many strong opinions, either agree or disagree. This thread is basically discussing whether or not there will be any major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence with in our lifetime. This author doesn't seem to think so.

If I were in the administration's position, I would delete this feature as it is not used.

Unwritten Rules

The “governors” would sometimes refer to the official set of rules governing the site for guidelines of his action. Many other times, he would tend to judge an issue with his own “human” opinion. So there are many unwritten rules. The following list give a demonstrations of such rules.

1. Unrelated discussion is not encouraged. For example, in the Mitbbs.com/CS forum, a lengthy discussion about Macy's shoe department would be considered appropriate, and it would likely to draw a warning from one of the CS “governors”.

2. Meaningless lengthy posts are not encourages. For example, A user made an ASCII art and it was accidentally scrambled when posting onto the forum. This would result in a long and non-sense post, which would draw the attention of the OC “governors”. Of course, if it is really an ASCII art, this user can easily explain the situation and not being punished.

3. Repeated information is not encouraged. For example, some one posed his resume template on the Mitbbs.com/jobhunting forum, and asked for suggestions. After some time there weren't as much responses as he had hoped. He would likely to post the same information again. Repeating once might be OK but a lot more than that would get him in trouble.

4. Posting violent or nude content without subject line specification is not allowed. Over time, the OC users developed this rule. This is a helpful, and can be imposed by human “governors”. This rule prevents cases such as accidentally opening such contents in front of children. Children under 14 are not allowed to register.

5. Sending private unrelated emails to other users may get reported and suspected as spamming. Basically, the private email account of a user is visible by all other users. If a user thinks there is any inappropriate messages through this email channel, he could report the sender to the “governor”.

There are yet many other unwritten rules applied on different forums of Mitbbs.com. Some of them are forum specific, such as the rules in Mitbbs.com/exchange forum, which was discussed in the Social role, capital and trust session. This forum is different as money is involved. Some of the rules are not often encountered. For example, users can commit “suicide” for his certain account. Basically, a user can announce that a particular id is not going to be used anymore. Sometimes, this is to stop people from contacting them this way. This action can not be taken more than once.

Online identity and interaction

Choice a Online Community (OC) & Working definition of online identity

In this session of study, I selected a forum from a popular OC, Mitbbs.com. Mitbbs.com is a Chinese bulletin board system site. The majority of its users are overseas Chinese. The focus of this particular forum, mitbbs.com/jobhunting, is for people to exchange information regarding job hunting. It contains a wide range of job related topics. The OC contributors are from different professions, education levels, geographical locations, and etc. One main reason that I chose this particular forum instead of some other more popular forums, such as fashion or movies, is that people maintain a high level of awareness of their online identities while they participate in job hunting related conversations. 

For instance, a person might not worry too much about exposing her fashion taste or favorite celebrities. And posting false information of what kind of movie one likes is not that big of a deal. This might change over time, and others understand and expect this change rather than associating mis-matched profile with dishonesty. In the job hunting forum, however, if there are two different versions of a person's education background, other would likely to doubt this OC participant's honesty.

As Signals in Social Supernets pointed out, different social network sites (SNSs) have different online identity models. The paper compared the following two kinds as examples. LinkedIn is for professionals. It has no photographs, the profiles are resumes of education and work, and the comments are in the form of testimonials from co-workers. Identity is firmly tied to one's professional self, and there is limited ability to explore other people's networks. On the other hand, MySpace is popular among young people, and it has a very different atmosphere. Its profiles feature photographs, music, and embedded programs, and users can explore the network far beyond their own acquaintances.

Use Scenario #1

In comparison of these two sites, LinkedIn and MySpace, mitbbs/jobhunting has an online identity system somewhere in between. Similar to LinkedIn, it does not feature in sharing photographs or personal interests. Users are not required to fill out the profile's page, or make them viewable to all. 

The screenshot above shows the personal profile for a user with an id “huaifans”. It has the following entries, contact, interests, education background, working experiences, blog, joined clubs, and posted articles. This user didn't fill out his contact, interests, education background, or working experiences. And he didn't grant public the right to view his blog, joined clubs, or posted articles.

This is a rainy day scenario of this approach, since we failed to obtain this user's professional identity by browsing his profile. The sunny day scenario of this approach is discussed in the last section.

This is actually fairly common on mitbbs.com/jobhunting. It is unlike LinkedIn, Monsters, or any other specialized sites, which are resources for both employers and job hunters. The active participants in this forum are mostly job hunters. So, they would not feel the need to publish their professional experiences in a public way. Most of them still maintain these personal information, and have them available to employers who occasionally visit this site.

Use Scenario #2

If the users do publish their profiles then the identity model is straightforward. If they don't have these information available, then for the public, we don't get to see detailed information about this user. But it still won't be hard to obtain a rough knowledge of the user's professional identity. We could take a look at a users activities on the OC and hence have a rough idea of his professional identity.

In addition, as Signals in Social Supernets pointed out, self-description featured profile are easily perceived, but are composed of conventional signals and easily faked. Others, such as the network and communication patterns of everyone connected to the individual, are more reliable. So, we now take a look at these activities. 

The screenshot above shows a list of favored articles marked by “huaifans”. I briefly translated the first several entries as below. 

1. Microsoft onsite interview reflections

2. A Google interview question

3. I don't understand this answer of a Google's interview question.

4. What does this mean? (during Google's phone interview)

5. Google's phone interview questions

6. Qualcomm's phone interview reflections

This is a sunny day scenario of this approach, since we successfully obtained a rough knowledge of the professional identity of this user by going through article tiles that this user marked as favorite.

The screenshot above shows a list of articles posted by this user retrieved by searching his id in this job hunting forum. It contains new threads and comments from this user about Google's job application and onsite interviews. This is be a sunny day scenario for this approach, since we successfully obtained a rough professional identity of this user by searching for all articles that he posted and commented.

With these two methods, it's not hard to derive that this user is a computer science professional, and he is in the process of looking for a company job. Furthermore, organizations on the west cost seem to attract to him.

Use Scenario #3

Like LinkedIn, mitbbs.com/jobhunting forum is not featured to share photos or personal interest, but focuses on a professional side of the user's identities. On the other hand, however, mitbbs/jobhunting is similar to MySpace in the sense that its users can explore the network far beyond their own acquaintances. Anyone can look around and find people with similar job interests or professional background. This provides a rich environment for the users to contact and make friends with people in either a private or public way.

The screenshot above shows a private message sending to the user with id “huaifans” and asking for sharing some of his recourse. This is common as a way to get to know a user's identity further. This way we could share some of his resources, and have a look at his profile, blog, and joined clubs. As mentioned in the first scenario, when an employer is interested in advertising a position, usually, he would post the position and have private conversations with potential employees through the messaging feature of this forum.

Wellman at al.'s sense of networked individualism

This empirical study agreed with Wellman with respect to his opinion on networked individualism in the The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism paper, Internet use is reinforcing the preexisting turn to societies in the developed world that are organized around networked individualism rather than group or local solidarities. With resources like mitbbs.com/jobhunting, a job hunter no longer have to go to workshops, study groups, or any other real-world people networks to obtain knowledge that he needs. He could accomplish the learning in a much more efficient fashion. 

As the The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism paper argued, the developing personalization, wireless portability, and ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet all facilitate networked individualism as the basis of community. The cost of travel and getting to know group members is a time-consuming procedure, with the right OCs one can bypass these steps. Changes in the nature of computer-mediated communication both reflect and foster the development of networked individualism in networked societies. A person doesn't have to follow his group, his group follows him with easy accessible mobile technology nowadays.

How is online identity shaped and expressed through interactions in this community?

As discussed in three scenarios, there are multiple ways a user can shape his identity. The most direct way is by filling out the profile page, as demonstrated in scenario #1. The listed items might not be enough to describe an individual to his satisfactory. In this study, I found people publishing their personal websites in either their profile pages or in their signature fields. The personal websites are sometimes school pages, blog pages, sometimes even their facebook pages. This way, getting to know this individual is a very straightforward job.

The screenshot above shows the profile page and signature field of a user with the id “kaymiliu”. This user not only fill out his contact and personal interests, he also provided the link to his personal blog, which contains pictures, articles, detailed profiles of him. This is a sunny day version of the example in scenario #1.

Besides information provided in these fields, we can also track this user's activity. As the article Signals in Social Supernets mentioned, this is a more trustworthy and reliable way of knowing a user's identity. Besides the screenshot provided in scenario #2, the following screenshots demonstrate more features that helps us tracing a user's activities on this OC.

The screenshot above shows the incomplete list of public viewable friends of the user with id “kaymiliu”. Knowing someone's friends helps in knowing him.

The sreenshot above shows the incomplete list of public viewable blog entries that the user with id “kaymiliu” is maintaining. Last but not least, the users could always contact, in a private way, someone that seems interesting to know more about. This is demonstrated in the scenario #3 above.

Social knowledge production and services

Choice of the Topic

In this session of study, our goal is to compare social computing tools that do similar work as existing systems and services in the traditional ways. The topic I chose is analyzing and comparing social Q&A sites with libraries and schools. I picked this topic because I am familiar with both of these two systems. I have been studying and working in different school systems for several year. During this time, I have been using numerous Q&A sites in different disciplines and fields. For both of the traditional school systems and the online Q&A sites, I have been serving as a content consumer and contributor. Due to these reasons, I find myself comfortable commenting on both systems with a full range of perspectives.

Just as Always on: Libraries in a World of Permanent Connectivity paper pointed out as mobile communications in the context of the broader diffusion of networking became part of the research, learning and social lives of our users, it resonates with communication and group behaviors of students. It has became a unavoidable question needing to be addressed. They include issues regarding the differences of the tradition learning systems, such as libraries and school, and what Web 2.0 is providing to students and researchers nowadays. Also, how we would improve both systems by learning from each other.

Comparison of Social Q&A Sites vs. Libraries or Schools

Availability

This is an obvious difference between these two system. It is also the main factor that people turn to the Internet for references and help. Always on: Libraries in a World of Permanent Connectivity discussed this and stated that the library has a visibility and brand challenge. but services need to be available. At the same time, the continued competition for resources means that the library needs to be as visible as possible. This is not easy and calls for heightened marketing engagement and local political skills.

Meanwhile, with cheaper and cheaper hardware, it has become a business standard to keep their database servers on continuously. For content provider organizations, these technologies provided essential support for them to host and serve information non-stopping. Well, for us, the end users, this means the resources is available to us any time when we want it. For instance, many people have work setups at home these days. It is not always reliable to ask classmates, professors, or colleagues. They might have the answers, but might not be working in the same time zone as others. 

An example of this situation can be found from the paper, A Librarian's Worst Nightmare. It discussed Yahoo! Answers, and stated that answers draw a large enough crowd that you are likely to get an answer almost instantaneously. Post a semi coherent question and the responses will come within minutes, if not seconds. Of course, this paper might be talking about questions like “advice on your new haircut”, but from another point of view, this demonstrated that there are always people out there on the Internet that are listening and might be able to help you in a timely manner. The quality of the answers is of course an other matter.

We Learn by Teaching

Teaching can be considered as a bi-product of participation in online Q&A sites. In traditional learning systems, such as libraries and lectures. It is usually rare for students to get a chance to play the role of content provider, the teachers, and teach their peers. This is not adopted as part of the schooling practice not only because teachers might not like it, students might not like it either. In fact, it might sound like more work and hence not be favored by students at all. The resistance from both sides makes this hard to practice in schools.

We know, however, there is truth in this old expression, we learn by teaching. And it is in the human being's instinct to share information and knowledge. How could we embrace this and turn it into a good learning mechanism? I turned out with the right encouragement, people are willing to explain, describe, argue, and clarify things to others. In this sense, they become content provider and are playing the role of teachers. The thriving of numerous online Q&A sites is a direct support of this argument.

Examples of this scenario can be found everywhere on Q&A sites. I often go to a math and physics Q&A site called <a href=”http://www.physicsforums.com/”>physicsforums.com</a>. Similar to many other Q&A sites, and as A Librarian's Worst Nightmare said they do not focus users' energy on revision rather than addition. The site is more more devoted to quantity than quality. The answers are therefore not always correct, and the site does not “clear” incorrect answers. From the back and forth discussion, however, people reach the right the answer or get on the right path.

The screenshot above demonstrated such a discussion. One person posted a question, and the others tryed to give him solutions. Due to the nature of online forums, participants tend to polish their answers and make them as concise and clear as possible. After back-and-forth discussions and arguments, they reached an agreement of the correct solution. During this procedure, everybody was a content provider and was trying to share with others what they know about the subject. At the end, they all gained from this discussion.

Anonymity

One of the main reason that the previous benefit can be obtained from online Q&A sites is its anonymity. Think about the tradition lecture, as the paper Social Annotations in Digital Library Collections stated how users are given the option to identify themselves directly influences the quality of content they will contribute. If the use of real names is enforced, many people will be more hesitant to post content.

Ease of retrieval

It is a common feature for online Q&A sites to allow users to quickly access and review their previous activities. It is not quite achievable for traditional learning systems. Some students bring recorders for lectures, but rarely anybody records off-lecture conversations, neither with classmates nor professors. These conversations, however, sometimes contain important information that we would like to retrieve afterward. The paper Social Annotations in Digital Library Collections discussed this point as well.

The screenshot above demonstrated such a retrieval. This view is a retrieval of all previously asked questions by the user “AJH”. A similar view which is not included here demonstrates a retrieval of all previously answered questions. This feature makes online Q&A sites a good learning tool. The conversation and activities are recorded without extra effort.

Quality of answers

As the paper A Librarian's Worst Nightmare pointed out the quality of Q&A sites is guarded by anybody. There is no guarantee to get a good results from consulting these site. As the paper stated, if you started off uncertain, it's hard to imagine you would read the responses and fell any more confident due to many different opinions.

This is an unavoidable problem for online Q&A sites. Meanwhile, it is what we gain from learning in a traditional way. We look up reference books from the library, we make notes of what the professor says in class. These information are mostly true and trustworthy. People might argue that books can be completely wrong and misleading as well, but judging by percentage, library service is probably more trustworthy than Q&A sites. After all, most of time we are listening to some nobody out there on the Internet rather than some established scholars.

On the other hand, we can't throw the baby away with the bath water. We want to consider online Q&A as a different learning experience rather than comparing the quality of pieces of information individually.

Depth of the subject

The paper Always On: Libraries In a World of Permanent Connectivity stated that as resources become more abundant we see that students and researchers are concerned about how they “spend” their attention. If some of us happen to think learning off the Internet from various Q&A sites would be enough for an education, he need to reconsider this conclusion. From my experience, Internet provide a broad view but hardly any deep view. Or I should say it is difficult to dig out the in-depth discussion or explanation of a particular subject. This is true especially when we are so sure about the subject and do not know where exactly to start searching for it. In fact, this is the stage of understanding during research in many cases.

An example of such scenario is referring to professors for some specific knowledge. Professors generally have better knowledge and certain authority in specific subject. We could also turn to the online Q&A sites, but there are times we just need to talk to someone that are experts, and there is no such guarantee from online Q&A sites.

Summary

Online Q&A sites win in the first four comparisons. Social Q&A sites are available at all time. They provide a platform that encourages people to become content provider, and in such a way it encourages people to learn from teaching. Social Q&A sites are operated in an anonymous fashion, so that everybody is free to talk without feeling embarrassed like they would in traditional learning environments. Last but not least, Social Q&A sites logs user activities, and these logs can be used as records, which helps the learners in many obvious ways.

Traditional learning systems, such as libraries and schools, however, win in the last two comparisons. They provide trustworthy solutions, and authority of ambiguities. They also support in-depth discussions with professionals when we need it.

Learn From Each Other

Libraries or Schools Learn from Social Q&A Sites

Based on the discussion above, we could incorporate some of the features from online Q&A sites to traditional learning systems to improve what we have in today's school systems.

Schools might be able to provide an anonymous environment for students to ask questions, and clarify doubts from both professors and peers. With such a mechanism, students would almost for sure be more interactive and inclined to ask questions when they come across them.

There are drawbacks for such a system though. A easy one to imagine is that people might take advantage of the system and turn it into a social network provider. A Librarian's Worst Nightmare pointed out that Yahoo! Answer suffers from this. The difference is school servers might not have the capability to sustain such un-intended activities due to issues like traffic, space, and security.

Another drawback could be collaborating or even cheating in assignments. In order to be a truly anonymous environment, there should be absolutely no way to track people's real identities, regardless of requests from the school or peers. If this criterion is not satisfied, none of the aforementioned benefits would apply. But, in such a system, there's no way to stop activities that are against course policies, such as collaborating.

Social Q&A Sites Learn from Libraries or Schools

Not only traditional learning systems can learn from social Q&A sites, social Q&A sites can benefit from the strengths of traditional learning systems as well. And this an on going effort among many social Q&A sites.

We need in-depth discussions and explanations available from online learning environments, rather than just questions such as “suggestions of my haircut” mentioned in A Librarian's Worst Nightmare. More subject specific, professional forums are needed to attract experts and benefit online community users as well as ordinary learners. The <a href=”http://www.physicsforums.com/”>physicsforums.com</a> is an example of stepping towards such a direction. Many of the comments are provided by Ph.D students or researcher in the field, thus, it provides a good expert views.

The drawback of such a system is also pretty obvious. Raising the standard of contents might discourage people from participating and intimidate ordinary users. A chain reaction of this can be as serious as dropping in popularity, which is everything for online Q&A sites. Nobody wants to talk if he does not think there is anybody out there listening to him.

Social role, capital and trust

Choice of Online Communities

In this session's study, we are going to compare the social capital and trust mechanisms of two online communities (OCs). Based on this goal, I decided to choose two OCs where social capital and trust play an important role in their daily services. Inspired by the buying camera example presented in the A Survey of Trust Use and Modeling in Real Online Systems paper, I chose Amazon.com and mitbbs.com/exchange. Most us are familiar with Amazon.com. It is a US-based multinational electronic commerce company. It started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys. [wiki]. Mitbbs.com, is a Chinese bulletin board system site. The majority of its users are overseas Chinese. The focus of this particular forum, mitbbs.com/exchange, is to provide a platform where its users buy, sell, and exchange a broad variety of goods. Since money is involved, it is obvious that the social capital and trust are an important factor that affect people's activities on these two OCs.

Social Capital and Trust Mechanisms

Amazon.com

Amazon.com applies different trust models to different categories of sellers. For any of these trust models to work, an overall assumption is made. It is assumed that the users trust the host, Amazon.com. Under this assumption, Amazon.com authorizes sellers. For companies, such as Macy's and Nike, Amazon hosts stores under their company or brand names. This is similar to a public certification authorized by Amazon.com. Users would trust the identities of these stores. For example, we would trust the Macy's store on Amazon.com is really Macy's rather than some other organization that claimed this name ahead of Macy's. We trust Amazon.com to not letting any other organization to own the name of Macy's other than Macy's itself. In this sense, again, it works like a public certificate signed by a trusted third party, where the third party here is Amazon.com. In this sense, Amazon.com embrace the spirit of social capital, as mentioned in On and Off the Net: Scales for Social Capital in an Online Era, what is Social Capital? For some researchers it means the social groups and networks that create positive outcomes, while for other researchers it means the outcomes themselves. We can think of both in this case.

On this other hand, however, this trust mechanism would not work for individual sellers for obvious reasons. For instance, A person, P, has goods to sell and P opens a store under the name “IamP”. P would easily pass the Amazon.com authentication step, assuming no body has claimed this name already and this name does not corresponds to any well-known merchandise brand. Basically, Amazon.com tells its users that P is the real “IamP”. Well, this tells very little regarding whether or not P should be trusted. Meanwhile Amazon.com did it job to sign the certificate. Apparently, to facilitate transactions and thrive the OC, other trust mechanisms are needed. Amazon.com uses user rating system for individual sellers.

The sreenshot above demonstrates the rating for a book seller named “oldbookcase”.

The screenshot above demonstrates some of the comments from buyers of this book seller. As we can see this book seller has a large number of transactions and a overall high score. Amazon.com supplies this data as a trust credit for “oldbookcase”. Again, since the assumption is that buyers trust Amazon.com, this information is going to be taken into account when the buyers purchase goods.

The screenshot above demonstrates how the trust credit of sellers are used in the search results. They are placed a clear locations with emphasized fonts.

Mitbbs.com/exchange

The user activities in mitbbs.com/exchange differs from Amazon.com in many ways. First, people not only buy and sell, they also exchange goods. Judging from the name of this forum, the exchange action was probably the initial intention. Of course, trading with money counts as exchanging as well. Second, from my observation, very few users are there to make a profit. In many cases people are there to get ride of goods they don't want. Most of the goods are new but not always. With the increasing trend of online shopping, people, especially girls, often find out they've purchased goods that are not actually suitable for their needs. An obvious example is clothing. Without trying them in person, it's hard to tell whether or not they fit. So, after receiving their goods from other online stores, they decide to sell of exchange for something else from mitbbs.com/exchange. Third, generally, things getting exchanged are pretty cheap. This is determined by the first two characteristics. Since the sellers are not interested in making a profit, they tend to offer very reasonable prices in order to get ride of the goods quickly. Since the buyers are aware of fact that the goods they are going to receive has been marked as “unwanted” by its first-hand buyer already, they won't be willing to spend a good deal of money in purchasing them.

The nature of the bulletin board system and the aforementioned characteristics of mitbbs.com/exchange forum determined its social capital and trust mechanisms. The host, mitbbs.com, is not assumed to be a trusted third party. Anybody can participate in the discussion and hence can participate in the exchange activities. Mitbbs.com is not involved in the trust model. This is a fundamental difference from Amazon.com. For instance, assume a person, Q, purchased something from a seller at Amazon.com, and the product did not match with the its description. This transaction, hence, involves cheating or even commercial fraud. Q can not only rate negatively of this seller, Q can also report this seller to Amazon.com, which has the responsibility to maintain it business environment. Q could demand his money back and Amazon.com will assist Q to do so. Mitbbs.com, however, is not involved in any user activities, and it is not responsible for any fraud transactions. It does not provide a uniform rating mechanism as Amazon.com.

On the other hand, as a thriving forum that has been serving its purpose for a long time, it is inconceivable that no trust mechanisms are imposed. So, I investigated not only the tools provided by the host, I also observed closely of the contents of people's participation, where the trust mechanism lays implicitly. Of course the accuracy of information is still not guaranteed since the host does not work as trusted certification source as we just discussed. This is similar to the problem mentioned in Establishing trust management in an open source collaborative information repository paper, verifying the accuracy of the emergency information used by the proposed model is essential to establish trust management in this particular context.

In the first mechanism, people post threads to report particular sellers. In this case, only extremal good and bad transactions are mentioned since the buyers have to go out of his way to create these threads. Other users refer to these threads and adjust the implicit trust credits of particular sellers, which are other regular users.

The screenshot above demonstrated a thread created by the user “ppjy” reporting the user “suxin”. They are both regular users of this OC. I briefly translated and summarized this thread as below.

ppjy: I recently purchased 8 items costing $120 from “suxin”, who used a $5 bubble envelop for shipping. The envelop was broken when it arrived, and some goods were missing. What should I do about this?

The second mechanism is built on top of the first one. Once in a while, some OC participants would summarize reported sellers and post a overall list of sellers to avoid. These threads are usually promoted to the first page of the forum and stay there for a reasonably long time.

The screenshot above demonstrated a thread created by the user “mononoke” summarizing a list of sellers that were reported negatively. I briefly translated and summarized this thread as below.

mononoke: derong, Seni, sw103, demonbull, lisacute, dennisfeng, qingxi, xiaotaosu, jojojo, chuer2009 were reported with fraut transactions. Please avoid!!!

In the third mechanism, the forum provides a searching tool. When it comes time to purchase goods, the buyer could conveniently search for this seller and evaluate his implicit trust credit from his previous activities.

The screenshot above demonstrated the search result for a user with id “babies”. From this search result, people can see that in the last two months, this user has exchanged baby closing, baby shoes, small furniture, makeup, hair accessories, Chinese medicine, SD card, and HP ink. From this information, other users can tell “babies” is an experienced exchanger. This information helps other to adjust the implicit trust credit for “babies”.

Suggestions of Trust Mechanism Improvement

Amazon.com

I believe Amazon.com is continuously putting effort into researches and empirical studies of how to improve their social capital and trust systems. Meanwhile they indeed have accomplished a good deal in this aspect. The current social capital and trust model together with other facilities they provide for their sellers and buyers have made them one of the main electronic commerce companies in the world. There are, however, still improvements to make. If I were to give Amazon.com suggestions in improving their trust mechanism, I would recommend rewarding users for rating. Everybody likes free stuff, even if they're little.

1. Giving out a small amount of Amazon.com credit for a certain number of ratings.
2. Giving out small prizes. For instance, since Amazon.com has large storage and a variety of goods, it should be easy to reward people by giving small prizes from their “hard-to-sell” products. These small prizes can be shipped together with the next purchase from Amazon.com to save the shipping cost and encourage purchase.
3. Giving out as accumulative special credits. Users can choose to accumulate this special credit and get something bigger later. For example, Amazon.com can have a monthly menu of small prizes. When the user see what he wants, he can get it with this special credits.

Mitbbs.com/exchange

Since this public bulletin board system is not profiting from the users' exchange transactions, it would be difficult to persuade its founders to raise money for re-designing and re-implementing the system into something fundamentally different from what they have right now. Of course, if that's not a constraint, then many rating techniques can be added. With that constraint though, we have to think about improving strategies with small modifications of the system.

I think the strategy proposed in the paper Survey of trust use and modeling in current real systems is suitable here. It basically embrace the Sprite of Google's PageRank. A meaningful situation is the following: every single user predicts the trust scores he/she should place in other users from his/her personal point of view and on his/her behalf. In this way, every user is in charge of aggregating all the trust statements he/she deems relevant (and in this way, he/she can, for example, limit himself/herself to just fetch information expressed by friends of friends) and run the local Trust Metric on this data. In this situation, everyone maintains a dynamically calculated score that reflects his trust credit, and make it visible to others. This would require small addition to the bulletin board system rather than implementing a rating system.

Proposal for the Final Project

In the last paragraph of the previous section of this post, I didn't really elaborate on that idea. I think it could be an interesting topic to explore more. I recently read the original paper published in 1998 presenting Google and its PageRake system, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. It was a smart move by Google back then, and it was a smart proposal by the Survey of trust use and modeling in current real systems paper to relate PageRake with OC's trust model. The PageRake precisely represents the trust credit of a web page. It sounded like a promising social network analysis study case that I can investigate.

Motivation for participation

Part I

In the paper Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online the authors addressed the question of what aspects of online communities (OCs) attract people to join. The study showed that besides the reason of utilitarian information exchange, people's social need of having friends and getting social support was also an important reason. This conclusion is supported by the paper Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities. In this paper, the authors pointed out that there are three main categories of users on Twitter, information source, friends, and information seeker. In this study, researchers found that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Users with similar intentions connect with each other. Learning how and why people use such OC tools can be helpful in improving these tools and adding new features that would motivate more users.

My own online experience agrees with these opinions, seeking for social support and friendship is definitely one of the main reasons that people participate on OCs. Like the paper, Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online, mentioned, social support was a popular reason for members in communities with health/wellness and professional/occupational topics. I visit online technical support communities for questions all the time. For example, when I switched my operating system from Windows to Linux for the first time, I had a lot of questions. Many of them are trivial and other people had experienced these problems as well. I was able to get the answers that I was looking for quickly. Without the help of these OCs, I would have to read a couple of books or take some courses in order to obtain the needed information.

In the paper Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities the authors hypothesized that individuals contribute when they are reminded of their uniqueness and when they are given specific and challenging goals. The messages in this study were passed to the OC users in the form of emails. The results showed that reminding participants of the benefits that either they or others receive from contributions depressed the number of ratings they made. The author concluded that overall, it is clear that calling users' attention to their uniqueness and to the benefits they provide through their action has an impact on their rating effort.

My own online experience would disagree with the opinion. The amount of email, which inform me the uniqueness of my participation or helping me setting goals of contributing on a particular OC, would not affect the activity level of mine on that OC. In fact their field study result didn't agree with their hypothesis either. The researchers found a decreased number of rating from the users after these emails.

Amazon.com has the emailing system to inform their users to rate products and sellers the users have encountered. When I purchase stuff from Amazon.com, I would rate the product if it fully meets my satisfaction or the quality is extremely poor. Basically, I won't rate products that are just so so. This is not being affected by Amazon's emails that remind me of rating. Meanwhile when I want to rate a product, I wouldn't wait until Amazon's email.

Part II

For the empirical study of this session, I observed an OC called huaren.us/computer & IT. This is an American Chinese CS related forum. Although I've never joined this site, I heard about huaren.us as one of the most popular American Chinese forums. So, motivation of participation is not a problem for this OC. Copied below is a sreenshot of this OC.

I've collected two pages of the most current discussions. Since the posts are mostly in Chinese, I've translated and summarized them as below:

Share-Resources type of threads:

1. Useful open-source software I've used
2. Oracle DBA two-day tutorial
3. Useful Oracle tutorial videos I found.
4. Yoga Mama software download.
5. <Calibre - E-book Management 0.7.35> download
6. A great PDF to Word/PPT/Excel/Epub/HTML converting tool: AnyBizSoft 2.5.0
7. This year's top 10 star hardware.
8. Link to download Macworld magazine.
9. 26 tips for using iPad
10. download Apple.iLife.2011.MAC.OSX-HOTiSO.

Share-Experiences type of threads:

1. This is how I DIYed my passport picture.
2. How to decode .rar file password.
3. Nvidia GTX 560 first hand information
4. Use ContactDel to Save Time when Cleaning up Your Address Book! 
5. My experience negotiating with Apple for repairing.
6. Recommend a video game.
7. iOS 4.1 (iPhone and iPod touch) jail break.
8. Windows phone 7 user experience.

Employer type of threads:

1. Looking for a part time iPhone developer.
2. Postdoc position available

News type of threads:

1. AMD Fusion is in store!
2. Dell's first 21.5 inch touch screen IPS is released.
3. 384SP, GeForce GTX560 report.
4. Try out this iPhone game: crazy coin (developed by the author)
5. Try out this iPhone game: tip guide (developed by the author)
6. livespace is closed?
7. Dropbox's new education plan. The storage pace is increased to 18G. 
8. Lenovo CPP is giving 20% off.

Discussion-starter type of threads:

1. Why is Mac popular among young people?
2. What do you guys think about these deals?
3. My top 10 IT technologies that are diminishing.

Question type of threads:

1. I can't open my facebook for iPhone app?
2. Are there any differences regarding security between using wireless and wired Internet accessing?
3. How do I connect my iTouch to the comcast wireless?
4. A silly question: how do I shrink my email in to one page and print it?
5. Any recommendation of SAP studying materials?
6. What are the difference of iTouch 2G and 4G?
7. Can I do iPhone facetime with iPhone in China?
8. What does programmer analyst do? Is it harder than programmer?
9. What software adds subtitle on YouTube videos?
10. Which one should I buy: HP Probook T410 or T510?
11. What happens if I don't turn off my computer for a long time?
12. I can't open Skype face chat on my iTouch 4G, ideas?
13. My hotmail account was stolen, what should I do?
14. Is there a good way to google search images?
15. My computer doesn't read my USB flash drive.
16. How to delete SYSTEM TOOL 2001
17. Which one is better, Kindle or iPad
18. Does Kindle display Chinese?
19. I cannot log in my MSN.
20. What does this error message mean in MATLAB.
21. How to take screenshots

Question 1: What modes of participation are there

• Start a new thread
• Respond to an existing thread
• Send private messages
• Blog

Question 2: How is participation encouraged

• The visibility is great, and the system is easy to use. People see their posts immediately and it doesn't take any effort to figure out how to start a new thread or respond to others.
• It appears like people in this OC have general trust of other members and this community.
• Questions are usually answered in a reasonable amount of time. This encourages more questions.
• People develop friendships with other members, so sometimes they start to chat.
• The administrator remove inappropriate posts as an encouragement of the rest of the people. For example Internet robot advertisements are considered inappropriate.

Question 3: Which types of content draw the most responses

• Easy help calls attract a large number of responses. Many members could answer or have their own opinions obout how things should be done.
• Resource sharing also attracts people's attention. If the resource is valuabel, there would be many “thanks” posts. Also, there would be people asking for clarification and related questions in the same thread.

The paper Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory mentioned self-efficacy, needs to achieve, goals, and intrinsically motivation. This paper credit these characteristics of a person as the motivation of him to participate on OCs. In general, this paper holds the idea that a sel-efficacy person with greater need to achieve and has more intrinsically motivation would tend to set higher goals and hence contribute to the OCs more. This paper also covered other criteria that affects a person's OC contribution, such trust, group identity, and visibility.

From observing huaren.com forum, I would disagree with some of the opinions presented in the Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory paper. The amount of participation on OCs doesn't seem to be directly related to a person's self-efficacy, intrinsically motivation, or need of achievement. Based on my observation from huaren.com, those personal characteristics are probably not related with a person's online contribution at all. Since this is a popular OCs, many people developed friendship in a similar way the Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online paper mentioned. The majority of posts are people's chatting, sometimes related to the topic, sometimes not. We sure wouldn't consider these members have higher self-motivation. 

Not just for huaren.com, I think this is in general true. Would we consider the kind of people, who rate a lot on Amazon.com or IMDb.com, more self-efficacy or have higher goals than the rest of us? When I have a point to make, I contribute my opinion. But that's not the case for many core contributors on many OCs. They just tend to share more things with others, important or not. Let's take Twitter as an another example, the paper Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities pointed out that most of the posts on Twitter are about the users daily lives. We sure don't think sharing these information about yourself is a demonstration of self-efficacy and intrinsically motivation.

Online Community and Relationship vs. Traditional Ones

People are dedicating more and more of their time participating in various online communities. They establish seemingly close personal relationships with online community members. Through these relationships, they share opinions, obtain support and relaxation, just like real-world friendship would provide them. Are these relationships that people seek from online communities grant them the complete experience as tradition communities and relationships do?

... it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails

Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism

Learning to make the best of sometimes-unpleasant interactions is part of what makes a good citizen and a mature human.

Does the Internet Strengthen Community?

... a "social technology" used primarily for interpersonal interaction could increase social isolation and thereby decrease psychological well-being among its users

Reformulating the Internet Paradox

Let's look at the motivation of the aforementioned action, seeking friendship from online communities. The paper “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism” mentioned that, this action “shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails”. To elaborate this point, paper stated that “real intimacy requires risk--the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.”. This is indeed one of the important reasons that people open their arms to welcome online communities. The feeling of being popular and successful at interacting with others gives many individuals the motivation of participating on online communities.

This is especially true for teenagers. It is well known that teenagers are going through the phase of self-establishing. They sometimes see their own value through others eyes. Most of them grow out of this and gain confidence, certainty, and focus of themselves. But during the teenage period of time, they would tend to avoid the negative side of personal interactions, even through that means blinding themselves. This is just like the paper, “Does the Internet Strengthen Community?” mentioned: “Learning to make the best of sometimes-unpleasant interactions is part of what makes a good citizen and a mature human. Online groups do supplement certain social experiences but does not form a complete experience.”

If we were to talk to some one that is deeply involved in online communities and relationships, he might tell us logically that he is aware of all these concepts, and he is not taking his online activities that seriously. However, just like there's no alcoholic would admit that he is addicted to alcohol. Instead, he would tell us how good of a habit and how much it is beneficial for our health to have a moderate amount of wine. The paper “Reformulating the Internet Paradox” mentioned the “the Internet Paradox study (Kraut et al., 1998) found evidence of a causal link between Internet use and depression” for novice Internet users, such as imature teenagers mentioned in the previous paragraph. Nobody would volunteer for something that causes depression, but this requires self-discipline and restriction. The paper also pointed out that “self-efficacious Internet users were less likely to make mistakes that were sources of stress when using the Internet and were better able to work around problems that were not of their own making. They therefore correctly perceived a reduced likelihood of encountering stressful situations on the Internet.”

Twitter ... It is like thinking aloud in front of strangers. It is a marketing tool and a me-me-me medium.

Social Responsibility And The Web: A Drama Unfolds

It seems that in our headlong rush to join social networking sites, many of us give up one of the Internet's supposed charms: the promise of anonymity.

:

Celebrities don't need legions of MySpace friends to prove their importance. It's the rest of the population, seeking a form of parochial celebrity, that does.

Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism

When youngsters lead a life in mediated publics, the fear is that their adolescent thoughts, musings and immature actions might become a millstone around their neck, since the information will be embarrassingly accessible later on.

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

This is a great point, but unfortunately people are getting so used to it, and when someone pointed out in different occasions, he would be the one looking like a fool. In today's society, it seems like everybody needs more attention and a hint of celebrity. We see it everywhere we turn. For example, American Idol has been adapt by countries all over the world, and they've been all very successful. Privacy is what celebrities sacrifice for their huge financial gain. Though, it might appear that they are violated some times, it's actually part of the package. What's difficult to understand is the rest of the crowd trying so hard to promote themselves in a way that protecting privacy is not remotely a concern. Some of us might imagine some day some one might have second thoughts of what he did, regarding to exposing their privacy. Just like the paper “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance” argued, they might be embarrassed and even regret.

Such a friendship might seem shallow, but it is a convenient way of keeping in touch with a large circle of friends, which can be more difficult to handle offline without updated personal information - untold and unasked.

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

At the same time, the benefit that people gain from online community is keeping in touch with a large circle of friends, which cannot be achieved offline. Of course, this action might cause privacy issues, it's proven that people are willing to take this potential risk and gain the online friendships. So, my question is as below. 

Within a not as popular online community, how difficult or easy to keep in touch with many people, and would these action pose privacy issues?

For this study, I registered for a not so popular online community called GreenDrinks. As part of the standard registration procedure, I had to give away my name, email address, date of birth, zip code, picture, and gender.

You might argue that people could easily use fake identities, but you'll be surprised how many members use their real identities, just like on FaceBook. Then, I investigated the tools available to connect to community members, such as building groups, sending messages, posing comments, and inviting friends. All these seem to require extra work. I thought there should be even easier ways to keep in touch with people. Then, I found an app feature that provides more options.

In the picture above, it shows the most popular three apps. Apparently, people favor apps that help them keep in touch with other over apps from any others categories, such as music, news, and even games. Now let's think about the privacy issues. All these three apps are about tracking actions and update statuses. In other words, they are all about providing ways for others to know what your are doing and following what others are doing. This is clearly a privacy concern.

Arizona Shooting

The shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the 19 other people injured or killed on Jan 8, 2011, is being reported with many references to the role of social media, in terms of what motivated the tragedy and people's reactions to it. Find one of these references (include a link) and analyze, evaluate and apply what you feel are relevant concepts from at least four of the six required Session 1 readings to the role of social media in this story. You may post links to more than one news story to illustrate concepts from different readings if you like, but be sure your post is substantive enough to demonstrate your understanding of the relevant concepts from the papers you cite. Conclude by providing a brief definition of social computing, and comment on its potential power as a motivating force for positive and negative social phenomena.

-- Part I --

When this tragedy event first hit the news, I did some google searches with relevant keywords, such as “Gabrielle Giffords”, “Arizona gun shooting”, and “Congresswoman assassination”. One of the first things that I remembered was that some of the news didn't agree with each other. This is not surprising. It is exactly what people would expect from any recently happened high profile news events. In other words, don't trust just one news source and search for more information, just what I was doing.

During the procedure of delivering news, some people injected their personal views into the information passed on by them, such as, guesses, predictions, or even wishes. This brings up one of the questions asked in the paper, Online Databases-Web 2.0: Our Cultural Downfall?

When advertising and public relations are disguised as news, the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred. Instead of more community, knowledge, or culture, all that Web 2.0 really delivers is more dubious content from anonymous sources.

-- Online Databases-Web 2.0: Our Cultural Downfall?

We could name an example of such phenomenon happened in this particular new event. After the gun shooting on Jan 08, some news reported that Gabrielle Giffords was shot and killed, while some other news stated that she survived the fetal period. For a moment, people have two versions of the story. The following link is about ABC's false report.

http://www.examiner.com/tv-in-national/abc-news-issues-apology-for-false-gabrielle-giffords-death-report

The news president of ABC responded with an apology.

Here’s what happened at ABC News. … for a brief moment, about 10 minutes, ABCNews.com put up a banner citing other reports that congresswoman had died. ...

This brings up another point made in the paper, Online Databases-Web 2.0: Our Cultural Downfall?

Message getting through? Keen might see this as one of the most pervasive dangers of social networking--the seductive power that leads even those professionals tasked with creating, collecting, and distributing high-quality information to become early adopters

As a news network, a broadcasting company, people might think they need to be precise with what they say about some objective events, such as whether Gabrielle Giffords is dead or not. But reported news that was adopted from other reporters.

ABC had to correct it and went out of their way to apologize and clarify the mistake. However, information online is passed on in so many different ways, such as blogging and forum comments. People might not go back to correct their mistakes. Here is one of the more careful bloggers who did correct the blog entry.

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2011/01/in-memoriam-rep-gabrielle-giffords.html

-- Part II --

During my search of news stories, it was not surprising to find that many interesting entries are what people said on their facebook, Myspace, or some other social network service (SNS). In order to study and view the contents, I, as a social information research, need to be part of the SNS. This is one of the points made in the paper, Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations.

First, we need to be inside of the networks, online communities, and collaborative movements to be able to see what is going on and describe it

We will have to become part of the collaborative cultures of Web 2.0, we will need to build our own profiles, make some flickering friendships, expose our own choices, preferences and views, and make ethical decisions about what we reveal and the information we filter out of these communities and into our findings.

-- Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations.

People digging information from SNS sites are not necessarily social information workers. They discover news and deliver what they discovered in these SNS sites as news to other people. Apparently, this is a common practice inside and outside of the academic world. This agrees with the make idea of the paper, Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations. The following link is an example of such  information dug from a SNS, facebook. Although, this particular “news” was found out false by the author later.

http://www.elliscountyobserver.com/?p=18475

-- Part III --

Also during this study, I found many different personal opinions about this tragedy event. We always have ideas about things happening around them. Typically, we would like to share, exchange, and even defend our opinions if necessary. I believe this is part of the human nature. We would like to have many audiences. This is one of the focuses of the paper, Blogging as Social Activity, or, Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?

Many bloggers liked that they could be less responsive with blogging than they could in email, instant messaging, phone, or face to face communication. They seemed to be holding their readers at arm's length.

-- Blogging as Social Activity, or, Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary?

For example, the following link is a blog entry. The author thinks Gabrielle Giffords was shot because she is Jewish. It doesn't matter whether the opinion itself is true or false, what matters is that blogging provides this platform of sharing and picturing a large number of audience.

http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2011/01/gabrielle-giffords-was-shot-because-she.html

-- Part IV --

Last but not least, I'd like to mention the bridging of online and offline social network provided by SNSs. I learned about this news from a friend of mine through a SNS. This person is also my friend in real life. The paper, Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship addressed this idea.

Although exceptions exist, the available research suggests that most SNSs primarily support pre-existing social relations.

-- Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship 

For me, I have only people that I know in my SNS, so this statement should hold for in my case. The SNS provides us a convenient way of exchanging information. If we were to exchange news only through a person to person manner, such as emails, or phone calls with friends, then the amount of news exchanged would decrease by a large number

-- Summary --

Without any doubt, in this new event, the social media played an important role, and continue does. With great power comes greater responsibility, there are issues and problems that social media researchers need to consider, such as the truthfulness and the accessibility for researchers. Meanwhile, social media provides the users great convenience: We can express ourselves with potential large number of audience; We build online communication platform over our offline communities; And lots more.