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 ...

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,...

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...

Nowadays the huge amount of video material stored in multimedia repositories makes the search and retrieval of such content a very slow and usually difficult task. The existing video abstraction systems aim to ease the multimedia access problem by providing short versions of the original content which ease the search and navigation process by reducing the time spent in content browsing. There a...

The creation of user-generated content is an approach which is used to activate learners. This paper presents an approach supporting mobile collaborative use of user-generated e-flashcards within small ad-hoc learning communities. The application of this approach to support cooperative work and workplace learning is discussed too.

The use of analogical arguments is most often associated with political argumentation. However, our previous studies have found that analogical arguments are not as convincing as factual arguments. Should politicians rethink their rhetorical techniques ? In this paper, several possible criticisms of previous findings are considered, to determine whether analogical arguments might be considered ...