How very timely that I discovered this article today about a group called Rapleaf, who purport to understand how people use the social web by following their “internet footprint.” As a quick aside: I was pretty disappointed after signing up for an account to see what info they had on me—it was hardly complete. A [...]
As part of a larger study I’m working on, I need a way to validate social network measures like size and diversity. For example, if Johnny has 1000 friends on Facebook, you would say that his online social network is much larger than Suzy’s of 100 friends. But “in real life,” does Johnny really have [...]
After Kittur, Chi, and Suh’s Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk (CHI 2008), Ed Chi and I decided to run another study using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. I finally tallied our “expenses” and response rate, and though it would be interesting to share.
Now, Ed and I were interested in learning something interesting about web search, [...]
“Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world, can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.”
–Michael Scott, “The Office”
In fact, we all secretly believe Wikipedia is the best thing ever, but there is a debate over the validity and accuracy of the information, [...]
http://tinyurl.com/2xvuqd
This is an interesting finding on the apparent spread of obesity through social contact. But I wonder if there isn’t some predisposition to choose friends who are already like you in some ways (similar behavior, habits, likes/dislikes). This would bias the social networks to becoming obese (or skinny) together, I’d think, and might account for [...]
