The Discourses of Empowerment and Web 2.0

Consumer content generation in the Web 2.0 environment from a libertarian perspective is about the democratization of mediated knowledge where it creates the possibilities to produce new knowledge and media economies in a postmodern world. This chapter examines the notions of empowerment afforded by multimedia technologies on the Internet where new forms of knowledge, politics, identity, and community can be fostered through the Web 2.0’s architecture of participation, collaboration, and openness. It also discusses how these unlimited possibilities to produce content present new social and ethical dilemmas. They not only challenge conventional ways in which knowledge and expertise have been constructed in modern and postmodern societies but also require more rigorous methods to identity what can constitute expert knowledge. The production of user-led taxonomies and data repositories has raised the need to re-examine user-generated content and its function and coexistence within the existing systems and archives of knowledge.

Online Human Activity Networks (OnHANs)

Recently, Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, wikis (e.g., Wikipedia), social networks (e.g., MySpace), 3-D virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life), and so forth, have created fresh interest in the Internet as a new medium of social interactions and human collaborative activities. Since the emergence of Web 2.0 applications, Web services that support online human activities have gained an unprecedented boost. There have been conceptual studies on and overviews of individual Web 2.0 applications like blogs, online social networks, and so forth, but there has not been a study to date which provides a theoretical perspective on the online human activity networks (OnHANs) formed by these Web 2.0 applications. In this chapter, we classify various forms of OnHANs focusing on their social and business purposes, analyzing the core components of representative OnHANs from the angle of the activity theory, and finally providing a theoretical discussion concerning how OnHANs provide values to the individuals and the organizations involved in those activities.

How Employees Can Leverage Web 2.0 in New Ways to Reflect on Employment and Employers

How and why businesses can and should exploit Web 2.0 communication technologies for competitive advantage has recently become the focus of scholarly attention. Yet at the same time, one key organizational actor in the business equation–the employee as an individual and collective actor with distinct interests from that of the employer, has been given scant attention. Using media accounts, questionnaire and interview data, this chapter seeks to map out early trends in employee interests in Web 2.0. The findings point towards three distinct, yet interconnected employee uses for Web 2.0–collaborative practices that extend employee abilities to exchange a wide-range of ‘insider information,’ express conflict, and ‘take action’ against employers. Due to the nature and size of cyberspace, however, more research is required to gauge the popularity and effect of these emergent trends.

Extending and Applying Web 2.0 and Beyond for Environmental Intelligence

This chapter aims to apply the intelligence used in businesses decision making to an organization’s environmental management strategy so as to support its green credentials. While the World Wide Web (WWW or Web for short) has had an impact on every aspect of human life, its current and upcoming versions, dubbed Web 2.0 and beyond, need to be considered in the context of environmental management. The use of decision making technologies and processes in this area of an organization is what we call “environmental intelligence” (EI). This EI can be used by businesses in order to discharge one of their significant corporate responsibilities–that of managing their activities that affect the environment including waste reduction, green house gas reduction, recycling, minimizing unnecessary human and material movements, and so on. Furthermore, the use of EI, it is envisaged, will also help organizations create local and industrial benchmarks, standards, audits, and grading that will help a large cross section of businesses to comply with the environmental requirements. The architecture of such enterprise intelligent systems needs to incorporate technologies like executable services, blogs, and wikis in addition to the standard communication and execution requirements of the Web. This chapter describes the literature review and the initial output of the research being carried out by the authors which, we hope, will eventually result in an environmentally intelligent Web-based business strategic system (EIWBSS).

Social Software and Web 2.0

Currently, there is much talk of Web 2.0 and social software. A common understanding of these notions is not yet in existence. Also the question of what makes social software social has thus far remained unacknowledged. In this chapter, a theoretical understanding of these notions is given. The Web is seen in the context of social theories by thinkers like Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Karl Marx. I identify three levels in the development of the Web, namely Web 1.0 as a web of cognition, Web 2.0 as a web of human communication, and Web 3.0 as a web of cooperation. Also, the myths relating to Web 2.0 and its actual economic and ideological role in contemporary society are discussed.

Sociology of Virtual Communities and Social Software Design

The Web 2.0 movement is the latest development in a general trend toward computer-mediated social communication. Electronic communication techniques have thus given rise to virtual communities. The nature of this new type of social group raises many questions: are virtual communities simply ordinary social groups in electronic form, or are they fundamentally different? And what is really new about recent Web-based communities? These questions must first be addressed in order to design practical social communication software. To clarify the issue, we will resort to a classical sociological distinction between traditional communities based on personal relations and modern social groups bound by functional, more impersonal links. We will argue that virtual communities frequently present specific features and should not be assimilated with traditional communities. Virtual communities are often bound by reference to common interests or goals, rather than by strong personal relations, and this is still true with Web 2.0 communities. The impersonal and instrumental nature of virtual communities suggests practical design recommendations, both positive and negative, for networking software to answer the real needs of human users.

Visualising Social Networks in Collaborative Environments

Social networking and other Web 2.0 applications are becoming ever more popular, with a staggering growth in the number of users and the amount of data they produce. This trend brings new challenges to the Web engineering community, particularly with regard to how we can help users make sense of all this new data. The success of collaborative work and learning environments will increasingly depend on how well they support users in integrating the data that describes the social aspects of the task and its context. This chapter explores the concept of social networking in a collaboration environment, and presents a simple strategy for developers who wish to provide visualisation functionalities as part of their own application. As an explanatory case study, we describe the development of a social network visualisation (SNV) tool, using software components and data publicly available. The SNV tool is designed to support users of a collaborative application by facilitating the exploration of interactions from a network perspective. Since social networks can be large and complex, graph theory is commonly used as a mathematical framework. Our SNV tool integrates techniques from social networking and graph theory, including the filtering and clustering of data, in this case, from a large email dataset. These functions help to facilitate the analysis of the social network and reveal the embedded patterns of user behaviour in the underlying data.

Assessing the Total Cost of Ownership of Virtual Communities

The usage of social software and virtual community platforms opens up opportunities to bridge the gap between customers and companies and to integrate customers into the value-added process. Ideas generated by members of a virtual community can be utilized to improve and to innovate a company’s value adding activities. However, the implementation and operation of virtual communities may have a considerable impact on financial performance measures of a company. Hence, to measure the profitability of a virtual community appropriately, means of efficiency calculations have to be employed. The objective of this chapter is, therefore, to develop a measurement framework to evaluate the financial performance of a virtual community. The focus is on calculating the total cost of ownership. After introducing a general measurement framework, a particular measurement system is derived from the framework and is subsequently applied to a real life example of the Berlin Stock Exchange.

A Comparative Analysis of Online Social Networking Sites and Their Business Models

In the world of e-marketing, new business models are introduced to accommodate changes caused by various factors, including the markets, the services, the customers, among others. One latest trend of e-marketing is social networking Web sites, many of which have attracted not only large number of users and visitors, but also business companies to place their online ads on the sites. As an important example of Web 2.0 applications, online social networks deserve comprehensive studying and analysis; they are not only employed as an effective vehicle of e-marketing, but may impact how future Web-based applications would be developed. In this chapter, we explore online social networking as a new trend of e-marketing, by conducting a comparative analysis of online social networking sites. We first discuss the various types of online social networks, based on the classification by Laudon & Traver (2008), and then analyze online social networks from a business strategy point of view, by discussing the primary revenue models for online social networking sites. The primary contribution of this chapter is a comparative analysis and discussions of representative online social networking sites and their respective revenue model(s). This chapter aims to provide the reader with a basic understanding of the emerging online social networking Web sites and their primary revenue models.

Healthcare 2.0

From an economic, as well as a social point of view, healthcare is a significant part of our society and forms a major, ever-growing market. Therefore, this sector has the constant challenge of improving and reducing the cost of services. With respect to interaction, communication, and collaboration between patients and doctors, as well as among each other, the Internet provides new possibilities. Therefore a massive potential for innovation, by so called Web 2.0 applications, is offered. They are also increasingly used via mobile devices. The present article attends to this research with the aim to discuss potentials and restrictions of the use of Web 2.0 applications in healthcare as well as the mobile use of it.