Avatars are lifelike characters created by technology. Research suggests that avatars can increase the persuasiveness of online sales channels. The authors investigate how the social cues inherent in avatars influence consumers’ affect and shopping value. In Study 1, social cues induce perceptions of Web site socialness, leading to increased pleasure and arousal, both of which positively influe...

Implementations of our methods and the datasets used in our experiments are available on our project web site:

Since their introduction, social network sites (SNSs) have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are hundreds of SNSs, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SNSs a...

The objective of this paper is to study on the most famous social networking site Facebook and other online social media networks (OSMNs) based on the notion of relationship or friendship. This paper discussed the methodology which can used to conduct the analysis of the social network Facebook (FB) and also define the framework of the Web Mining platform. Lastly, various technological challeng...

A social network represents a social community as a directed graph. Communication on the Web has given rise to social network formation like, Web Community, Referral System etc. An earlier effort has proposed a data model for such Web-based social network. Present paper discusses the relevant index structures for processing queries on a social network schema based upon the proposed data model. ...

The advent of Web 2. 0 has been instrumental in paradigm shift of how people communicate? These communications are a rich source of relationship data. Analyzing such a vast amount of relationship data is not a trivial task. Social Network Analysis is a promising field of research to take advantage of this huge pool of relationship data. But before this data is analyzed from Social Network Analy...

The Internet has great potential as a medium for social change in international relations by providing a forum where ideas can be explored, transmitted, and archived in real time. In order to answer the question, “can the internet become an emancipatory medium?” two bodies of literature must be evaluated: Habermas’ work on cognitive interests, discourse, and communicative action, and the metath...