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Lecture 1
Jan 06, 2010

Outline

Course logistics
Introducing tools to be used in the course
Overview of Social Web and Web 2.0
Definition
History
Key elements
Example applications

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LinkedIn

Social networking
User Interaction
Creating and Sharing of content
Purpose
About You
URL: www.linkedin.com

Wordpress Blog

Weblog
Software tools allowing
easy creation of a website
Purpose
Personal learning journal:
Readings, seminars,
thoughts
URL:
www.wordpress.com

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Wiki

Collaborative
development of a
website
Purpose
Summary of lecture
presentations
Sample wiki
http://ir.exp.sis.pitt.edu/
paws_resources/
index.php/Main_Page

BibSonomy

Purpose URL:
Resource sharing http://www.bibsonomy.org
Research paper sharing Group: social_web

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CoMeT and Eventur

Sharing, tagging, social networking, trust

Purpose
Post and share information about research talks and cultural
events. Engage other users.
URL
• http://washington.sis.pitt.edu/comet
• http://eventur.sis.pitt.edu

Social Web

What do you think?

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The New Web: the Web of People

http://www.veryweb.it/?page_id=27

Web 2.0
•  Term was introduced following the first O'Reilly Media
Web 2.0 conference in 2004
•  Web 2.0 video by Tim O’Reilly
•  By September 2005, Google search for Web 2.0
returned more than 9.5 million results

http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2005/12/the_rise_and_ri.html

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What Web 2.0 is and what is not

Innovative applications Collection of new

of existing web technologies
technologies

blogs, wikis, and

Semantic web
RSS

Living Web Read-Write Web

What is Web 2.0

ric
ent Semantic Web
ta C
Da
Web 1.0 Web 1.0
Us
er C
ent Web 2.0
ric

Fun Video on YouTube

(http://youtube.com/watch?v=XPYLn2QblNI)

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Social Web of Web 2.0?

Social Web Web 2.0

The Social Web

•  The social web can be described as people
interlinked and interacting with engaging content
in a conversational and participatory manner via
the Internet
•  Since social web applications are built to
encourage communication between people, they
typically emphasize some combination of the
following social attributes:
•  Identity: who are you?
•  Reputation: what do people think you stand for?
•  Presence: where are you?
•  Relationships: who are you connected with? who do
you trust?
•  Groups: how do you organize your connections?
•  Conversations: what do you discuss with others?
•  Sharing: what content do you make available for
others to interact with

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The Social Web

Next generation web 

exploiting user-generated content in sophisticated and powerful way

Key Elements

What comes to your mind first when you

think about web 2.0?

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Key Elements

•  User-Generated •  User as a first-class

content participant,
•  The Users’ Web contributor, author
•  Blogs
•  Resources
•  Video (YouTube)

http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/12/01/social_bookmarking_services_and_tools.htm

Famous Web 2.0 Applications

Delicious & Flickr

Pioneered the concept of folksonomy
Collaborative categorization using freely chosen
keywords (tags)

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Podcasting

iPod + Broadcast
A collection of digital media files which is
distributed over the Internet using syndication
feeds for playback on portable media players
and personal computers

Key Elements

Collective Intelligence
(Wisdom of Crowds)
•  Critical mass of
participation act as
filtering what is
valuable
•  The web of
connections grows
organically as an
output of the collective
activity of all web
users

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User reviews on Amazon.com

Google PageRank algorithm

Using the link structure of the web

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Key Elements

•  Large values
created by the
community of
users through
collaboration
•  Applications
powered by user
community
•  Stigmergy

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Famous Web 2.0 Applications

SourceForge.net
Peer-production methods of open source software projects

Famous Web 2.0 Applications

Wikipedia
Launched in 2001
Largest and fastest
growing, and most
popular reference work
As of December 2007
9 ¼ million articles in
253 languages
2,154,000 articles in
English

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eBay

Collective activity of all its users

Cloudmark

Collaborative spam filtering

Aggregate the individual decisions of email users

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Key Elements

Long Tail
First coined by Chris Anderson (2004)
“Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater
volume of otherwise hard-to-find items at small
volumes than of popular items at large volumes. “
Majority of truly relevant information available
on the web is not on the well known web
servers
•  25%-40% of Amazon’s sales
•  1/5 of netflix rentals comes
from not top 3000 movies

Key Elements

Data Reuse
Usage of APIs (Application Programming
Interfaces)
Mash-ups
programming on the web
High level of abstraction

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RSS Feeds, APIs and Mash-ups

Time-bar of Web 2.0

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Social Web Technologies

Intelligence that emerges from collaboration

of many individuals
Social navigation
Navigation towards cluster of people
Navigation because other people have looked at
something
Following footprint of others
Social Search
Improving search using the data from past users

Social Web Technologies

Folksonomy
Collaborative tagging
The practice and method of
collaboratively creating and managing
tags to annotate and categorize
content

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Social Web Issues

•  Community based Systems share many

issues, which should be addressed
to produces successful
systems creators
1
•  Participation vs lurking
•  Social capital 10
Synthesizers
•  Social networking
•  Trust and reputation
•  Privacy and presence 100
consumers

Social Web Programming

RSS
Really Simple Syndication
XML based metadata content
Provides updates when the content is modified
Web services
"a software system designed to support interoperable Machine to Machine
interaction over a network."
SOAP
Simple Object Access Protocol
A protocol for exchanging XML-based messages over computer networks,
normally using HTTP/HTTPS
Ajax
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
A group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating
interactive web applications
Mash-up
A web application that combines data from more than one source into a
single integrated tool

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Future

2.0 2.0

Reading for next class

Social Navigation
1.  Footprints: history-rich tools for information foraging
(http://www.citeulike.org/user/brusilovsky/article/
518781)
2.  Supporting Social Navigation on the World-Wide-Web
(http://www.citeulike.org/user/claudioferreira/article/
86730)
Social Search
Social Information Access: The Other Side of the Social Web.
In: V. Geffert, et al. (eds.) Proceedings of SOFSEM 2008,
34th International Conference on Current Trends in
Theory and Practice of Computer Science, High Tatras,
Slovakia, January 19-25, 2008, Springer Verlag, pp. 5-22.

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