In recent years, news reporting and consumption has made the profound shift from paper-based media to free online publications, while the simultaneous emergence of Web 2.0 has fundamentally changed the way we react to news. In this paper, we argue that the rapid increase in volume of user-generated content now available presents new and exciting opportunities for the furtherment of news search....

Launched in 2005 as a video-sharing website, YouTube has become an emblem of participatory culture. A central feature of this website is the dazzling number of derivative videos, uploaded daily by many thousands. Using the ‘meme’ concept as an analytic tool, this article aims at uncovering the attributes common to ‘memetic videos’ – popular clips that generate extensive user engagement by way o...

The impact of social media on the travel industry is predicted to be tremendous, especially on its holiday travel segment. Although there is a plethora of studies concentrating on the role and impact of social media in travel related decisions, most of them are medium and community specific, or focus on a specific stage of the decision making or the travel planning process. This paper presents ...

This paper discusses a framework enabling real-time multimedia indexing and search across multiple social media sources. It places particular emphasis on the real-time, social and contextual nature of content and information consumption in order to integrate topic and event detection, mining, search and retrieval, based on aggregation and indexing of shared user-generated multimedia content. Us...

With the emergence of Web 2.0, the amount of user-generated web data has sharply increased. Thus, many studies have proposed techniques to extract wisdom from these usergenerated datasets. Some of these works have focused on extracting semantic relationships through the use of search logs or social annotations, but only hierarchical relationships have been considered. The goal of this paper is ...

We propose a novel general technique aimed at pruning and cleansing the Wikipedia category hierarchy, with a tunable level of aggregation. Our approach is endogenous, since it does not use any information coming from Wikipedia articles, but it is based solely on the user-generated (noisy) Wikipedia category folksonomy itself. We show how the proposed techniques can help reduce the level of nois...

Developed to address the challenges of the social web, this study aims to determine how consumers’ involvement in user-generated content (UGC) affects brand equity. The formation and testing of a conceptual model addresses a gap in the literature by exploring links between UGC, involvement and consumer-based brand equity. Based on previous research complemented by depth interviews with experts,...

We present a system for complementing snow phenomena monitoring with virtual measurements extracted from public visual content. The proposed system integrates an automatic acquisition and analysis of photographs and webcam images depicting Alpine mountains. In particular, the technical demonstration consists in a web portal that interfaces the whole system with the population. It acts as an ent...

Prosumerization is the enabling of users to act as producers. Prosumerization of content for the mobile internet, in which users are consumers and producers of content, is a recent trend. However, user-generated mobile services are the next big step for mobile service provision emerging from the prosumerization of content. Benefits for platform and telecommunication providers can be significant...

With the advent of ubiquitous connectivity and a constant flux of user-generated content, people’s online information seeking behaviors are rapidly changing, one of which includes seeking information from peers through online questioning. Ways to understand this new behavior can be broken down into three aspects, also referred to here as the three M’s – the modalities (sources and strategies) t...