The Information Ecology of Social Media and Online Communities

Authors

  • Tim Finin University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  • Anupam Joshi University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  • Pranam Kolari Yahoo! Applied Research
  • Akshay Java University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  • Anubhav Kale Microsoft
  • Amit Karandikar Microsoft

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v29i3.2158

Abstract

Social media systems such as weblogs, photo- and link-sharing sites, Wikis and on-line forums are currently thought to produce up to one third of new Web content. One thing that sets these ``Web 2.0'' sites apart from traditional Web pages and resources is that they are intertwined with other forms of networked data. Their standard hyperlinks are enriched by social networks, comments, trackbacks, advertisements, tags, RDF data and metadata. We describe recent work on building systems that use models of the Blogosphere to recognize spam blogs, find opinions on topics, identify communities of interest, derive trust relationships, and detect influential bloggers.

Author Biographies

Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Tim Finin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).  He has over 35 years of experience in the applications of AI to problems in information systems, intelligent interfaces and robotics.  He holds degrees from MIT and the University of Illinois and has held positions at Unisys, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT AI Laboratory.

Anupam Joshi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Anupam Joshi is a UMBC Professor with research interests in the broad area of networked computing and intelligent systems. He currently serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of the Semantic Web and Information.

Pranam Kolari, Yahoo! Applied Research

Pranam Kolari is a member of the technical staff at Yahoo! Applied Research. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science. His dissertation was focused on spam blog detection, with tools developed in use both by academia and industry. He has active research interest in internal corporate blogs, the Semantic Web and blog analytics.

Akshay Java, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Akshay Java is a UMBC PhD student. His dissertation is on identifying influence and opinions in social media. His research interests include blog analytics, information retrieval, natural language processing and the Semantic Web.

Anubhav Kale, Microsoft

Anubhav Kale received a M.S. degree in Computer Science from UMBC in May 2007. His thesis research demonstrated the effectiveness of detecting sentiment associated with links between blog posts and using this to enhance blog community recognition algorithms. He is currently a software engineer at Microsoft.

Amit Karandikar, Microsoft

Amit Karandikar received a M.S. degree in Computer Science from UMBC in May 2007. His thesis research produced a generative model for the Blogosphere which modeled both the reading and writing activities of bloggers. He is currently a software engineer at Microsoft.

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Published

2008-09-06

How to Cite

Finin, T., Joshi, A., Kolari, P., Java, A., Kale, A., & Karandikar, A. (2008). The Information Ecology of Social Media and Online Communities. AI Magazine, 29(3), 77. https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v29i3.2158

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Articles