Some of the interesting comments and conversations I heard:
Keynote speech
- In opinion mining, simply using bag of words is not enough. Structure of the text is also important, e.g., look for "still" and "however".
- ? and ! are negative feedback cues
Community
- Over a billion dollars spent on influential viral marketing.- My social cascade work got some attention.
- People's exposure to feed is the most critical factor in social cascade. Number of friends didn't play any significant role (i.e., accidental influential users?).
- Search "Facebook data" in Facebook. Join the Page!
- In a system like Yahoo! Answers, people reward answerers the most on topics like Music, Computer, and Medicine. However, Science questions were rewarded low.
Psychology and Users
- Like Stanley Milgram's familiar strangers in the offline world, we can find familiar strangers in the online counterpart. One key insight to do this is that it will benefit a lot of people. (Social networks have power-law degree distribution, where many people have few contacts. Knowing familiar stranger for people in the tail.)
- Download geotag data at DBpedia
Ranking
- CourseRank program in Stanford by Georgia Koutrika, popularly used by students to rank courses and plan course scheduling.
- Some cute findings: (a) the larger the department size, the smaller individual contribution is. (b) students who got better grades gave higher ranking to the course.
- High median node degree in social networks can reflect spurious relationships? Search "top friends" application on Facebook.
- Similar to "Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media" from CHI2009, paper "Using Transactional Information to Predict Link Strength in Online Social Networks" looked at wall and photo posts to guess tie strength. They used Top Friends app results as the ground truth.
Some thoughts on tie strength and influential users
- After listening to some of the talks, I had the following thought. Network-activity based studies on user interaction mostly focus on visible interactions, e.g., wall posts and photo tagging. This might be a good predictor when we want to measure the strength of ties between individuals (or simply ask who are my best friends?). Then, what does a tie strength mean in terms of viral marketing? Are friends of stronger ties a good indicator of influential people?
- I get a feeling that this is not the case. Based on the Facebook paper "Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion Through Facebook News Feed", we also learned that adoption of information has to do with simple exposure (but not on how popular a friend is). Indeed, exposure is an important and dominant factor in social networks. My recent work using social network clickstream data showed that more than 80% of user activity had to do with "silent" browsing---which a crawl-based study cannot capture. Which friends are important then in viral marketing? Best friends or those whom I get exposed to?
- Obviously there will be lots of overlap between the two groups. But, my conclusion today is that influential users are the ones whom I "actively" get exposed to. This means friends whom I follow up on their updates by visiting their pages. Would accidental influentials would be those whom I got opportunistically exposed to (e.g., Facebook's news feed) and joined cascades?
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