Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Bertino, Elisa, and Matei Sorin Adam: This title discusses the emerging trends in defining, measuring, and operationalizing reputation as a new and essential component of the knowledge that is generated and consumed online. The book also proposes a future research agenda related to these issues—with the ultimate goal of shaping the next generation of theoretical and analytic strategies needed for understanding how knowledge markets are influenced by social interactions and reputations built around functional roles.
Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets exposes issues that have not been satisfactorily dealt with in the current literature. In a broader sense, the volume aims to change the way in which knowledge generation in social media spaces is understood and utilized. The tools, theories, and methodologies proposed here offer concrete avenues for developing the next generation of research strategies and applications that will help: tomorrow’s information consumers make smarter choices, developers to create new tools, and researchers to launch new research programs….

  • Proposes new methods for understanding how opinion leaders and influential authors emerge on social media knowledge markets
  • Advances new approaches to theory-based understanding of how social media reputations emerge and shape content and public opinion
  • Highlights the most important understudied or promising areas of research regarding reputation and authorship on social media
  • Reviews existing accomplishments in the field of reputation research on social media knowledge markets
  • Features a multidisciplinary team of authors, covering several disciplines
  • Includes both senior, established authors and emerging, innovative voices”

When Citizens Bypass Government

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in Governing: “Local governments are facing new realities. Citizens’ trust in government has declined, and financial constraints do not allow local governments to deliver all of the services their communities would like. In response, citizens are changing as well. Increasingly, local residents and organizations are seizing opportunities to engage with their communities in their own ways by creating platforms that bypass government.
These platforms are powered by inexpensive technology and driven by a desire for community improvement that is bottom-up. While some local governments are embracing this development, others are reacting defensively, at least initially. As this phenomenon grows, more and more local governments will be faced with the challenge of deciding what their stances should be toward these citizen-engagement platforms.
In Alexandria, Va., a citizens’ group launched ACTion Alexandria, an online platform for residents to engage in challenges, debate solutions, share stories and develop relationships, all on their own and without the help or permission of the city government. Even though ACTion Alexandria is a platform created and owned by citizens, the city government supports it and even partners with it.
Oakland, Calif., initially took a less supportive stance to the citizen-developed Oakland Crimespotting website. Using open city law-enforcement data, Oakland Crimespotting provides residents with the most up-to-date information on crime in the city on an interactive map. A week after the site was launched, however, the city government cut off its data stream, saying Oakland Crimespotting’s frequent data demands were disrupting the city’s own crime-tracking website. Eventually, the city changed its mind and restored the data flow.
Citizen platforms are also have much to offer in times of crisis. In Allentown, Pa., in 2011, a devastating natural-gas explosion occurred in the downtown area. Five people died. During and following the disaster, Allentown residents used social-media platforms to provide updates about rescue and recovery, disseminate information about ways to help the affected families, and volunteer….”

Rethinking Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dani Rodrik at Project Syndicate: “By many measures, the world has never been more democratic. Virtually every government at least pays lip service to democracy and human rights. Though elections may not be free and fair, massive electoral manipulation is rare and the days when only males, whites, or the rich could vote are long gone. Freedom House’s global surveys show a steady increase from the 1970s in the share of countries that are “free” – a trend that the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington dubbed the “third wave” of democratization….

A true democracy, one that combines majority rule with respect for minority rights, requires two sets of institutions. First, institutions of representation, such as political parties, parliaments, and electoral systems, are needed to elicit popular preferences and turn them into policy action. Second, democracy requires institutions of restraint, such as an independent judiciary and media, to uphold fundamental rights like freedom of speech and prevent governments from abusing their power. Representation without restraint – elections without the rule of law – is a recipe for the tyranny of the majority.

Democracy in this sense – what many call “liberal democracy” – flourished only after the emergence of the nation-state and the popular upheaval and mobilization produced by the Industrial Revolution. So it should come as no surprise that the crisis of liberal democracy that many of its oldest practitioners currently are experiencing is a reflection of the stress under which the nation-state finds itself….

In developing countries, it is more often the institutions of restraint that are failing. Governments that come to power through the ballot box often become corrupt and power-hungry. They replicate the practices of the elitist regimes they replaced, clamping down on the press and civil liberties and emasculating (or capturing) the judiciary. The result has been called “illiberal democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism.” Venezuela, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand are some of the better-known recent examples.

When democracy fails to deliver economically or politically, perhaps it is to be expected that some people will look for authoritarian solutions. And, for many economists, delegating economic policy to technocratic bodies in order to insulate them from the “folly of the masses” almost always is the preferred approach.

…

Effective institutions of restraint do not emerge overnight; and it might seem like those in power would never want to create them. But if there is some likelihood that I will be voted out of office and that the opposition will take over, such institutions will protect me from others’ abuses tomorrow as much as they protect others from my abuses today. So strong prospects for sustained political competition are a key prerequisite for illiberal democracies to turn into liberal ones over time.

Optimists believe that new technologies and modes of governance will resolve all problems and send democracies centered on the nation-state the way of the horse-drawn carriage. Pessimists fear that today’s liberal democracies will be no match for the external challenges mounted by illiberal states like China and Russia, which are guided only by hardnosed realpolitik. Either way, if democracy is to have a future, it will need to be rethought.”

The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Book by Luciano Florini (Chapter 1 (pdf): “Considers the influence information and communication technologies (ICTs) are having on our world; Describes some of the latest developments in ICTs and their use in a range of fields; Argues that ICTs have become environmental forces that create and transform our realities; Explores the impact of ICTs in a range of areas, from education and scientific research to social interaction, and even war..
Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is changing the answer to these fundamental human questions.
As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an “infosphere”. Personas we adopt in social media, for example, feed into our ‘real’ lives so that we begin to live, as Floridi puts in, “onlife”. Following those led by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, this metaphysical shift represents nothing less than a fourth revolution.
“Onlife” defines more and more of our daily activity – the way we shop, work, learn, care for our health, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships; the way we interact with the worlds of law, finance, and politics; even the way we conduct war. In every department of life, ICTs have become environmental forces which are creating and transforming our realities. How can we ensure that we shall reap their benefits? What are the implicit risks? Are our technologies going to enable and empower us, or constrain us? Floridi argues that we must expand our ecological and ethical approach to cover both natural and man-made realities, putting the ‘e’ in an environmentalism that can deal successfully with the new challenges posed by our digital technologies and information society.”

Big Data and Chicago's Traffic-cam Scandal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal: “The danger is microscopic regulation that we invite via the democratic process.
Big data techniques are new in the world. It will take time to know how to feel about them and whether and how they should be legally corralled. For sheer inanity, though, there’s no beating a recent White House report quivering about the alleged menace of “digital redlining,” or the use of big-data marketing tactics in ways that supposedly disadvantage minority groups.
This alarm rests on an extravagant misunderstanding. Redlining was a crude method banks used to avoid losses in bad neighborhoods even at the cost of missing some profitable transactions—exactly the inefficiency big data is meant to improve upon. Failing to lure an eligible customer into a sale, after all, is hardly the goal of any business.
The real danger of the new technologies lies elsewhere, which the White House slightly touches upon in some of its fretting about police surveillance. The danger is microscopic regulation of our daily activities that we will invite on ourselves through the democratic process.
Soon it may be impossible to leave our homes without our movements being tracked by traffic and security cameras able to read license plates, identify faces and pull up data about any individual, from social media postings to credit reports.
Private businesses are just starting to use these techniques to monitor shoppers in front of shelves of goodies. Towns and cities have already embraced such techniques as revenue grabs, encouraged by private contractors peddling automated traffic cameras.
Witness a festering Chicago scandal. This month came federal indictments of a former city bureaucrat, an outside consultant, and the former CEO of Redflex Traffic Systems, the company that operated the city’s traffic cameras until last year….”
 

Follow the money: A study of cashtags on Twitter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Martin Hentschel and Omar Alonso at FirstMonday: “The popularity of Twitter goes beyond trending topics, world events, memes, and popular hashtags. Recently a new way of sharing financial information is taking place in social media under the name of cashtags, stock ticker symbols that are prefixed with a dollar sign. In this paper we present an exploratory analysis of cashtags on Twitter. Specifically, we investigate how widespread cashtags are, what stock symbols are tweeted more often, and which users tweet about cashtags in general. We analyze relationships among cashtags and study hashtags in the context of cashtags. Finally, we compare tweet performance to stock market performance. We conclude that cashtags, in particular in combination with other cashtags or hashtags, can be very useful for analyzing financial information and provide new insights into stocks and companies.”

The Rise of Virtual Advocacy Groups

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at Connectivity: “Ever since the launch of MoveOn in 1998, I have been evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of virtual advocacy groups compared to traditional, brick-and-mortar advocacy groups.
I hypothesized that organizing and working mostly online would allow advocates to escape a conundrum that ensnare those that rent pricey office space. As I have observed over the years, many brick-and-mortar groups dilute the effectiveness of their email programs for advocacy by inserting fundraising appeals into their email stream. As they emerged in the wake of MoveOn, virtual advocacy groups offered a new model of nimble organizations that could focus less on fundraising and more on advocacy.
Marketing guru Seth Godin describes this process as flipping the funnel. Like a funnel, he says traditional organizations ask supporters for self-sustaining money as broadly as they can, but mobilize a very small percent of them to do so. For this trickle of funds, they end up alienating many in the process. Much of the money raised, meanwhile, simply goes towards giving its supporters a megaphone to advocate for the organizations’ causes.
Today, most of an advocacy organization’s supporters already have their own megaphone: social media. So instead of alienating so many supporters with fundraising appeals to buy them a megaphone, Godin says advocacy groups should instead ask supporters to use the megaphones they already have on their behalf. Thus, the funnel is flipped into a megaphone and supporters don’t have to become alienated by excessive fundraising appeals.
This concept is central to any effective social media campaign. And with no rent to pay, virtual organizations should be best positioned to take advantage of the strategy.
In practice, virtual advocacy groups pioneered back in the ‘90s by MoveOn have proven to be more efficient purveyors of their members’ messages. And at the organizations I spoke to for this article, shifting work online has created workplaces that live up to their founders’ values, too.
I reached out to Nita Chaudhary and Kat Barr, the co-executive director and chief of staff of UltraViolet, an advocacy group formed to fight sexism and expand women’s rights in the U.S. I spoke to MomsRising executive director Kristin Row-Finkbeiner, whose group takes on critical issues facing women, mothers and families. I also consulted Joan Blades, co-founder of both MoveOn and MomsRising who currently works for a new start-up called Great Work Cultures, which promotes a variety of new workplace organizational models that are more respectful of employee work-life balances. Both Chaudhary and Barr previously worked at MoveOn.
MoveOn, MomsRising and UltraViolet are not merely virtual advocacy groups, but are three of the most successful advocacy groups in the U.S. with many millions of supporters among them….”

Behavior Analysis in Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Reza Zafarani and Huan Liu in IEEE Intelligent Systems (Volume 29, Issue 4, 2014): “With the rise of social media, information sharing has been democratized. As a result, users are given opportunities to exhibit different behaviors such as sharing, posting, liking, commenting, and befriending conveniently and on a daily basis. By analyzing behaviors observed on social media, we can categorize these behaviors into individual and collective behavior. Individual behavior is exhibited by a single user, whereas collective behavior is observed when a group of users behave together. For instance, users using the same hashtag on Twitter or migrating to another social media site are examples of collective behavior. User activities on social media generate behavioral data, which is massive, expansive, and indicative of user preferences, interests, opinions, and relationships. This behavioral data provides a new lens through which we can observe and analyze individual and collective behaviors of users.”

Startup lessons from the Knight News Challenge: Make damn sure you fill a market need

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at GigaOm: “The Knight Foundation looked at the 28 media-focused startups it funded as part of its News Challenge competition in 2010 and 2011 and came up with some useful lessons for those who might want to follow in their footsteps
Media startups are a lot like any other startup, in the sense that they are a risky bet on an idea or vision — but what makes them even harder is that they are aimed at an industry that is undergoing unprecedented upheaval, filled with potential customers who are struggling to keep their heads above water. What does success look like in that kind of environment? The Knight Foundation knows better than most, since it has funded dozens of startup ventures over the years through its News Challenge, and it has come out with a report that looks at what it has learned.
The report considered the progress of 28 projects that applied for and won funding as part of the 2010-2011 Knight News Challenge competitions, and includes a profile of each — from the Front Porch Forum, a Vermont-based community-building service that started up in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, to a winner called FrontlineSMS, which uses mobile technology to serve the information needs of small communities that don’t have reliable internet access.
Among the lessons that Knight drew from this roster of winners is one that will sound familiar to any technology startup or venture capital partner: namely, make sure your idea serves a market need, as opposed to just being a cool technical solution. This is especially important in an industry like media, the report says:

Selling innovations to news organizations is extremely difficult because they may lack the money and time to spend on innovative projects or the technical capacity to take full advantage of new tools. The innovation may also be entering a market guarded by institutions that may be resistant to change. Fundamentally, unless an innovation addresses a pressing need, journalists and news organizations will not adopt it.”

In democracy and disaster, emerging world embraces 'open data'

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy Wagstaff’ at Reuters: “Open data’ – the trove of data-sets made publicly available by governments, organizations and businesses – isn’t normally linked to high-wire politics, but just may have saved last month’s Indonesian presidential elections from chaos.
Data is considered open when it’s released for anyone to use and in a format that’s easy for computers to read. The uses are largely commercial, such as the GPS data from U.S.-owned satellites, but data can range from budget numbers and climate and health statistics to bus and rail timetables.
It’s a revolution that’s swept the developed world in recent years as governments and agencies like the World Bank have freed up hundreds of thousands of data-sets for use by anyone who sees a use for them. Data.gov, a U.S. site, lists more than 100,000 data-sets, from food calories to magnetic fields in space.
Consultants McKinsey reckon open data could add up to $3 trillion worth of economic activity a year – from performance ratings that help parents find the best schools to governments saving money by releasing budget data and asking citizens to come up with cost-cutting ideas. All the apps, services and equipment that tap the GPS satellites, for example, generate $96 billion of economic activity each year in the United States alone, according to a 2011 study.
But so far open data has had a limited impact in the developing world, where officials are wary of giving away too much information, and where there’s the issue of just how useful it might be: for most people in emerging countries, property prices and bus schedules aren’t top priorities.
But last month’s election in Indonesia – a contentious face-off between a disgraced general and a furniture-exporter turned reformist – highlighted how powerful open data can be in tandem with a handful of tech-smart programmers, social media savvy and crowdsourcing.
“Open data may well have saved this election,” said Paul Rowland, a Jakarta-based consultant on democracy and governance…”