Visualization in Support of Social Networking on the Web

In this chapter the authors explore the contributioSocial Media Marketing Web X.0 of Opportunities Baruh, Lemi Kadir Has University, Turkeydevelopment of user-manipulable interfaces.

Social Media Marketing Web X.0 of Opportunities

In recent years social media applications, which enable consumers to contribute to the world of online content, have grown in popularity. However, this growth is yet to be transformed into a sustainable commercial model. Starting with a brief overview of existing online advertising models, this chapter discusses the opportunities available for advertisers trying to reach consumers through social media. The chapter focuses on viral marketing as a viable option for marketers, reviews recent viral marketing campaigns, and offers recommendations for a successful implementation of social media marketing. In conclusion, the author examines future trends regarding the utilization of the emerging Semantic Web in marketing online.

Digital Energy

Since energy use is a type of consumer behavior reflecting the interests to maximize some objective function, the human being activities seen in energy terms might be used to create the social aggregations or groups. Electric energy generated from ecologic sources brings some unpredictability. Authors model the unpredictability of the distributed generation in order to create a tool for minimization. Authors propose the novel method to build real life smart micro grids in the distributed generation context characterized by zero emissions. The proposed tool becomes an instrument to create the social aggregation of users and negotiate locally the “social” energy in real time, strengthening and mastering a virtual neighborhood of the local community.

Online Virtual Communities as a New Form of Social Relations

The generalization of the new information technologies has favored the transformation of social structures and the way of relating to others. In this changing process, the logic of the social relationships is characterized by the fragility and the temporality of the communicative systems reciprocity which are established “online” in a new cybernetic culture. “Virtual communities” are created in which the interaction systems established by individuals exceed the traditional categories of time and space. In this manner the individuals create online social webs where they connect and disconnect themselves based on their needs or wishes. The new online communication technologies favor the rigid norms of the “solid society” that dilute in flexible referential contexts and reversible in the context of the “global and liquid society” to which the sociologists Bauman or Beck have referred to. Therefore the objective that the authors propose in this chapter is to try new theoretic tools, from the paradigms of the new sociology of technology, which let them analyze the new relational and cultural processes which are being generated in the cultural context of the information global society, as a consequence of the new communication technologies scope. Definitely the authors propose to analyze the meaning of concepts such as “virtual community”, “cyber culture”, or “contacted individualism”, as well as the meaning and extent of some of the new social and individual behaviors which are maintained in the Net society.

Leveraging Semantic Technologies Towards Social Ambient Intelligence

These times, when the amount of information exponentially grows on the Internet, when most people can be connected at all times with powerful personal devices, we need to enhance, adapt, and simplify access to information and communication with other people. The vision of ambient intelligence which is a relevant response to this need brings many challenges in different areas such as context-awareness, adaptive human-system interaction, privacy enforcement, and social communications. The authors believe that ontologies and other semantic technologies can help meeting most of these challenges in a unified manner, as they are a bridge between meaningful (but fuzzy by nature) human knowledge and digital information systems. In this chapter, the authors will depict their vision of “Social Ambient Intelligence” based on the review of several uses of semantic technologies for context management, adaptive human-system interaction, privacy enforcement and social communications. Based on identified benefits and lacks, and on their experience, they will propose several research leads towards the realization of this vision.

Public Intimacy and the New Face (Book) of Surveillance

In recent years, social media have become an important avenue for self-expression. At the same time, the ease with which individuals disclose their private information has added to an already heated debate about the privacy implications of interactive media. This chapter investigates the relationship between disclosure of personal information in social media and two related trends: the increasing value of subjective or private experience as a social currency and the evolving nature of automated dataveillance. The authors argue that the results of the extended ability of individuals to negotiate their identity through social media are contradictory. The information revealed to communicate the complexity of one’s identity becomes an extensive source of data about individuals, thereby contributing to the functioning of a new regime of surveillance.

Social Self-Regulation in Computer Mediated Communities

This article documents the findings of research into the governance mechanisms within the distributed on-line community known as Wikipedia. It focuses in particular on the role of normative mechanisms in achieving social self-regulation. A brief history of the Wikipedia is provided. This concentrates on the debate about governance and also considers characteristics of the wiki technology which can be expected to influence governance processes. The empirical findings are then presented. These focus on how Wikipedians use linguistic cues to influence one another on a sample of discussion pages drawn from both controversial and featured articles. Through this analysis a tentative account is provided of the agent-level cognitive mechanisms which appear necessary to explain the apparent behavioural coordination. The findings are to be used as a foundation for the simulation of ‘normative’ behaviour. The account identifies some of the challenges that need to be addressed in such an attempt including a mismatch between the case findings and assumptions used in past attempts to simulate normative behaviour.

Anomaly Detection for Inferring Social Structure

In traditional data analysis, data points lie in a Cartesian space, and an analyst asks certain questions: (1) What distribution can I fit to the data? (2) Which points are outliers? (3) Are there distinct clusters or substructure? Today, data mining treats richer and richer types of data. Social networks encode information about people and their communities; relational data sets incorporate multiple types of entities and links; and temporal information describes the dynamics of these systems. With such semantically complex data sets, a greater variety of patterns can be described and views constructed of the data. This article describes a specific social structure that may be present in such data sources and presents a framework for detecting it. The goal is to identify tribes, or small groups of individuals that intentionally coordinate their behavior—individuals with enough in common that they are unlikely to be acting independently. While this task can only be conceived of in a domain of interacting entities, the solution techniques return to the traditional data analysis questions. In order to find hidden structure (3), we use an anomaly detection approach: develop a model to describe the data (1), then identify outliers (2).

Effects of Digital Convergence on Social Engineering Attack Channels

Social engineering refers to the practice of manipulating people to divulge confidential information that can then be used to compromise an information system. In many cases, people, not technology, form the weakest link in the security of an information system. This chapter discusses the problem of social engineering and then examines new social engineering threats that arise as voice, data, and video networks converge. In particular, converged networks give the social engineer multiple channels of attack to influence a user and compromise a system. On the other hand, these networks also support new tools that can help combat social engineering. However, no tool can substitute for educational efforts that make users aware of the problem of social engineering and policies that must be followed to prevent social engineering from occurring.

Individual Differences in Social Networking Site Adoption

This chapter focuses on detailing the role of five individual level factors—Internet self-efficacy, self-esteem, need to belong, need for information, and gender—in influencing the attitudes toward social networking sites (SNS) and the adoption of such sites. First, the growing importance of social networking sites in business is discussed, and their usage as advertising vehicles is outlined. Individual differences in SNS adoption are presented from a technology acceptance model framework. A paperpencil- based survey is conducted and data obtained is used to test a structural model that explains the role of individual-level factors in influencing individuals’ attitudes toward SNS, their willingness to join SNS, and their actual membership on SNS. Results are presented and managerial implications are drawn.