A major challenge for designing future social media sites allowing a broader range of user actions is the difficulty of extrapolating from experience with current sites without first distinguishing correlations from underlying causal mechanisms leading to successful communities. The growing availability of data on user activities provides new opportunities to uncover correlations among user act...

As corporate Web sites are becoming increasingly important marketing communication media, a communication activity via a Web site becomes a central issue among scholars and practitioners. Despite many rigorous studies, they do not provide a rich understanding of this new phenomenon. To overcome the shortcomings of previous research on the Web, we develop a conceptual model for Web-mediated comm...

Citizen sensing: Humans as citizens on the ubiquitous Web, acting as sensors and sharing their observations and views using mobile devices and Web 2.0 Services. Citizen-sensor network: An interconnected network of people who actively observe, report, collect, analyze, and disseminate information via text, links to other resources, and various media including audio, images and videos. Social med...

With businesses seeking to seize the momentum of social media and social networking, technology-enabled social commerce has emerged to combine the power of online social networking with shopping. This study examines an emerging area in E-commerce, i.e., social commerce. Extending the online consumer behavior typology, this study categorizes online consumer behaviors into three types: transactio...

In this document, we describe techniques and approaches concerned with social-web archive contextualization. In particular, we describe our work on cultural dynamics, which refers to gaining insights into cultural patterns in social media, context-aware social search, and social media mining. We examine the reaction of people in social media to news articles, by developing techniques that could...

This research reports on a value-based empirical investigation of the adoption of Twitter social media application. A cross-sectional survey-based study conducted through the web site of a North-American university revealed that people familiar with Twitter see more value in the hedonic side and less value in the social side, both in comparison to the utilitarian value of this social media. The...

B logging. Tweeting. Facebooking. If you think these are terms only teenagers are familiar with, think again. The use of social media sites, or tools of Web 2.0, spans generations. The first social networking site, SixDegrees.com, was created in 1997, followed by sites such as BlackPlanet, Friendster and MySpace. But today, the most popular site is Facebook, with more than 200 million members w...

Today very popular Web portal sites, social networking sites, online media sites, commerce sites, etc., provide platforms for millions of visitors to visit daily and express their opinions on a wide variety of subjects. The site operators strive to increase the number of visitors, and the visitors often make use of several means at their disposal to participate in the formation of collective op...

An e-retailer sponsored virtual community (ESVC), as the backyard of an e-commerce website, provides consumers with an online platform to play with each other. Different from transactional e-commerce platform, ESVC assembles consumers together to fulfil their social needs. In recent years, with the popular of Web 2.0 information and communication technologies (ICTs), e-retailers also start to i...

The increasing use of social media, whereby users interact online, ensures that it will provide a useful source of evidence for the forensics examiner. Due to the dynamic nature of this environment, current approaches for its analysis are not without their limitations. This paper posits a novel inter-disciplinary methodology for the forensic analysis of user interaction with social media. In pa...