A recent NY Times piece about tools that can help companies to manage their online social media better inspired me to start a new series of bi-weekly blog posts at http://SocialMediaLab.ca about different “support” tools that can help individual users to manage and control the content of their ever-changing and ever-growing social media and networking accounts. This week’s focus will be on Social Archiving tools.
Information & Social Networks Symposium 2010 @ Dalhousie University
On Monday, October 4th, 2010, the Social Media Lab organized the first ever symposium on Information & Social Networks at Dalhousie University. The event was a phenomenal success and attracted over 75 members of the greater Dalhousie community. The attendees had an opportunity to learn more about Social Networks Analysis and how it can be used to better understand our modern networked society.
The symposium showcased the diversity of Social Networks Analysis (SNA)-related research at Dalhousie University and beyond, featuring talks by researchers from a variety of disciplines including Information Management, Business, Computer Science, Sociology, Biology, Mathematics and Statistics. The keynote talk, entitled Behind The Paradigm Shift Towards a Networked Society, was presented by Dr. Barry Wellman from the University of Toronto.
For the photos, presentation slides and podcasts from this event, go to http://SocialMediaLab.ca/event.
Feeling lost in this busy universe of social networking sites? Social Media Lab (SMiLey) rating system can help!
Last week we unveiled a new Social Media Lab (SMiLey) rating system for our ongoing weekly reviews of various social networking sites and tools for scholars like Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net . The reviews are available at http://socialmedialab.ca. Our hope is that this new rating system will make the reviews easier to read and more useful to our readers.
The SMiLey rating system is built around a set of 5 different characteristics: Site Purpose, Findability, Usability, Sociability and Popularity. Each characteristic is rated on a 5-point scale. Each point is represented by a smiley face. One smiley face 
represents a site that has major deficiencies and five smiley faces indicate a site that has little or no deficiency.
Read more about SMiLey at http://socialmedialab.ca/?p=422
Exploring Information Interaction ‘Context’ with Tefko Saracevic at IIiX2010
I just came back from the ‘Information Interaction in Context Symposium‘ in New Brunswick (the one in New Jersey, not the one in Canada), the home of Rutgers University. And I would like to share some of the highlights from the keynote speaker while it’s still fresh in my mind.
This year the keynote speaker is Dr. Tefko Saracevic from the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. Dr. Saracevic is a well-known figure in the field of Information Behaviour. He was one of the first scholars in the field to recognize the importance and influence of context (e.g., social, cultural, cognitive, etc.) on user’s information seeking and searching behaviour (see Saracevic’s 1996/97 stratified model of Information Retrieval interaction).
Dr. Saracevic started with a great overview of the field from the theoretical perspective. He then outlined some of the shortcomings within current Human-Computer Interaction theories, specifically how HCI theories are not strong on ‘context’ and criticized that the majority of Information Retrieval (IR) tests rely too heavily on the ‘traditional’ recall/precision model (including TREC). As a solution, he proposed five axioms related to ‘context’ in information interaction. I especially like the first axiom “One cannot not have a context in information interaction” which was inspired by Paul Watzlawick ‘s axiom in the Communication field – “One Cannot Not Communicate”. You can find the other four axioms (which are also very insightful) on Saracevic’s website (in the abtract of the talk or presentation slides).
In sum, I agree with Dr. Saracevic that the understanding of ‘context’ is crucial; especially for designing effective IR systems. But understanding the importance of ‘context’ and actually capturing & being able to make use of the information is two different things. Nowadays it is very easy and cheap to capture different kinds of contextual information such as user’s geographic location (via GPS-enabled phones) or user’s social ‘location’ (via online social networking sites); the harder question is how to take full advantage of this information without actually overwhelming the user with a tsunami of data and/or compromising user’s privacy. Going forward, these are some of the concerns that the IR field will have to address.
[Cross-posted at http://anatoliygruzd.com]