Firms are constantly evolving their Web presence. The premise of this study is that monitoring the behaviour of Web sites gives insights into the actual evolving strategies and motivations behind Internet investments in organizations. A variety of models have been utilized to study the progression of adoption of Internet technologies from different perspectives (e.g. Stages of Growth models). H...

Relationships mediated by ICTs are present in many aspects of everyday life. As they are established at a distance, one can see the projection of the other through the communication channels that are opened by the new ICTs. The objective of this paper is to discuss how the means of communication affect social presence in virtual environments. Based on the theory of investigative communities and...

New three-dimensional videoconferencing systems are trying to overcome the artificial nature of two-dimensional desktop video conferencing. The phenomenon of Social Presence serves as a measure of how natural persons feel when they are connected with a distant other through a telecommunication interface. We present a study measuring the difference in Social Presence in three conditions: (1) des...

Two field studies investigate the importance of social presence (real and imagined) and famiiiarity whti the purchase act in producing embarrassment in the context ot an embarrassing product purchase. The results indicate tbat awareness of a social presence during purchase selection and commitment, whether real or imagined, is a motivating factor in creating embarrassmenl for the consumer. Furt...

This research investigates the development of electronic commerce in Malaysia. It reviews the nation’s e-commerce readiness and surveys local firms, a majority of them smalland medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), on their Web presence and e-commerce initiatives, management, capabilities and performance. Overall, while e-commerce in Malaysia is in its formative phases, a majority of firms in the su...

Increasingly, digital games offer sophisticated multiplayer experiences with teams of players able to play against “the computer” in raids or against each other in a variety of team matches. Social presence is therefore an important part of the gaming experience. However, existing measures of social presence in games lack the sophistication to deal with these more diverse gaming situations. Thi...

In the last decades the explosion of ICT has opened up new avenues regarding peoples’ accessibility to new job opportunities. Current technological advances in conjunction with people’s online presence provide a great opportunity to automate the recruitment process and make it more effective. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for improving the efficiency of erecruitment systems. Our ap...

Web-based learning mostly relies on written, asynchronous interaction, which grants learners time for reflection and freedom in the organization of their activity. Written communication, however, is considered an impoverished means by many people, because it lacks non-verbal cues, with consequent negative influence on the quality of the learning process, as concerns both its cognitive and motiv...

The Stochastic Block Model or the Planted Partition Model is the most widely used probabilistic model for community detection and clustering graphs in various fields, including machine learning, statistics, and social sciences. Many existing algorithms successfully learn the communities or clusters when the data is drawn exactly according to the model, but they do not work well in the presence ...