Full Description
This book provides an overview of interfaces to social information spaces, illustrated by several contemporary systems including Usenet News and CoWebs. Beginning with a general outline of those systems and a history of Usenet News, it looks at the problems of exploring virtual communities and distributed information systems, and of finding information in electronic environments. It outlines the successes and failures of traditional approaches like information filtering, collaborative filtering and information retrieval, and assesses new approaches such as visualisations of social processes and social navigation.
Among the key questions covered are:
- What aspects of an online group are important to its participants?
- How can the specific characteristics of a social information space be used to improve the design of the interface?
From Usenet to CoWebs will be essential reading for practitioners working on information spaces, conferencing systems, virtual communities and innovative interfaces to information spaces. It will also provide useful background reading for anyone studying or researching in these areas.
Contents
I Introduction to Online Studies and Usenet.- 1 Studying Social Information Spaces.- 2 "A Standing Wave in the Web of Our Communications": Usenet and the Socio-Technical Construction of Cyberspace Values.- II Studying Spaces.- 3 Measures and Maps of Usenet.- 4 The Dynamics of Mass Interaction.- 5 Conversation Map: A Content-based Usenet Newsgroup Browser.- 6 Silent Participants: Getting to Know Lurkers Better.- III Enhancing Spaces.- 7 Computer Mediated Communication Among Teams: What are "Teams" and How are They "Virtual"?.- 8 Co Web — Experiences with Collaborative Web Spaces.- 9 From PHOAKS to TopicShop: Experiments in Social Data Mining.- 10 GroupLens for Usenet: Experiences in Applying Collaborative Filtering to a Social Information System.- 11 Exploring Interaction and Participation to Support Information Seeking in a Social Information Space.- Appendix: Studying Online Newsgroups.- A.1 Introduction.- A.2 Posting to Usenet.- A.3 Usenet Propagation.- A.4 The Birth and Death of Newsgroups.- A.5 How Messages Look.- A.6 How Usenet Is Accessed.- A.7 Invisible Layers of Usenet.- A.8 Dealing with Usenet Data.- A.9 Conclusion.
