This past week I was busy getting situated at UCSD again. I spent a lot of time in meetings discussing my research, and I very nearly completed the written proposal. In fact, my goal for today (Monday) is to actually finish the proposal and send copies to my committee.
However, I have also been busy applying for funding and fellowships. I submitted an application for travel funds from the ACM group on Women in Computing and from the UCSD Social Science Dean’s fund. I also applied for a 3-year fellowship from AT&T Labs, and submitted an application for a summer internship at PARC (again). Hope all this work will pay off somehow!
Per Leif’s advice, I’m going to keep these updates shorter. Although today I decided to attach the abstract for my second year project. Any comments/suggestions/advice is greatly appreciated! (Or you can stop reading now.)
I have begun to explore the behaviors, goals, and motivations of early adopters, or power users, as they engage with Web services and public communities online. A majority of Web systems used by these early adopters provide light-weight mechanisms for creating and saving new Web content, essentially providing an implicit means of sharing. In fact, several users reported that they intended to share information with small groups of known friends and even with unknown extended communities, even though sharing occurred as a side–effect of their primary actions. Furthermore, some informants indicated that their continued involvement served as a means of “self–endorsement,” to maintain relationships and accrue social capital. Regardless of the actual user motivations, these online behaviors have the potential of creating repositories of knowledge that would benefit information discovery and learning by others. However, this preliminary work has only considered the perspective of the individual who is sharing information. Therefore, I would like to extend data collection to look at the behaviors and interactions among a small group of online friends (4–5 individuals), to observe the cycle of information as it is shared and received by different members of the group. I will ask the entire group to video record their online activities for the same 2–week period, and I will subsequently interview participants about their behavior and the behaviors and perceived influence of others in the group. While my main purpose is to document the diffuse, yet hopefully overlapping, activities of a group of individuals as they engage with new Web systems and with each other, I also hope to explore the social and cognitive motivations for their actions and sharing behaviors.
