ICWSM'09 note - day three

Leveraging Diversity

- Ideas embracing diversity in opinions getting popular: Sidelines, Google moderator

- Goal is to project an accurate proportion of users supporting different opinions. let users get an exposure to challenges or new ideas.

- Quick Q: do people really like diversity?

- Similar work on news media bias "NewsCube" (CHI'09). This work looks at content to aggregate similar news and project different themes news articles. Sidelines paper simply looks at voting counts.

- "Diversity in user activity and content quality in online communities" by Tad Hogg. How many activities does a user do per day?

- Users with very little online time or little activity harder to model (i.e., difficulty of modeling in a heavy-tail distribution).

- Visibility (or exposure) is the key mechanism by which information spreads? (whether exposed by friends or by serendipitous browsing). Visibility and interest are different. (look paper)

- Check out Lada Adamic's write-up on social networks at HP labs.

"Unlike viruses, which spread indiscriminately from host to host, pieces of information are propagated by people who find them interesting and who pass the information to others who they think may be interested. Since people are most similar to their immediate contacts, and this similarity decays as the distance in the social network between individuals increases, information becomes less relevant further away from the source and is unlikely to spread throughout the network. This holds true even in networks with power-law connectivity distributions where highly connected individuals, known as hubs, have the opportunity to potentially spread information to a large number of people. " (See paper)

- Spetrum: retrieving different points of view from the blogosphere.

- Meta search engine for blogs. Would be nice to see memes in the search results. Predicting bloggers' interests in realtime difficult.

- Blog directory (blog category, blogging fusion, yahoo! directory) - Do these sites really work? Blogs are ephemeral.