http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/feedbacks/feedbacks.pdf Why does the distribution of user contributions obey a power law? A significant percentage of online content is now published and consumed via the mechanism of crowdsourcing. While any user can contribute to these forums, a disproportionately large percentage of the content is submitted by very active and devoted users, whose continuing participation is key to the sites’ success. As we show, people’s propensity to keep participating increases the more they contribute, suggesting motivating factors which increase over time. This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop. We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com. Fang Wu, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman 2009-05-04 23:13:00 attention social media crowdsourcing http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/persistence/persistence.pdf How persistence does not lead to success A hallmark of the attention economy is the competition for the attention of others in information rich environments. Thus people persistently upload content to social media sites, hoping for the highly unlikely outcome of topping the charts and reaching a wide audience. And yet, an analysis of the production histories and success dynamics of 10 million videos from Youtube revealed that the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold. This paradoxical result is further compounded by the fact that the average quality of submissions does increase with the number of uploads, and also that the likelihood success is less than that of playing a lottery. Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman 2009-03-21 00:33:00 attention persistence success social computing lotteries youtube http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/feedback Attention matters in motivating contributions to enterprise social media. But some types of attention matter more. Increasingly, large organizations are experimenting with internal social media (e.g., blogs, forums) as a platform for widespread distributed collaboration. Contributions to their counterparts outside the organization's firewall are driven by attention from strangers, in addition to sharing among friends. However, employees in a workplace under time pressures may be reluctant to participate and the audience for their contributions is comparatively smaller. Participation rates also vary widely from group to group. So what influences people to contribute in this environment? In this paper, we present the results of a year-long empirical study of internal social media participation at a large technology company, and analyze the impact attention, feedback, and managers and coworkers participation have on employees behavior. We find feedback in the form of posted comments is highly correlated with a users subsequent participation. Recent manager and coworker activity relate to users initiating or resuming participation in social media. These findings extend, to an aggregate level, the results from prior interviews about blogging at the company and offer design and policy implications for organizations seeking to encourage social media adoption. To appear at GROUP 2009. Michael J. Brzozowski, Thomas Sandholm, and Tad Hogg 2009-03-18 00:00:00 blogs social media hp attention participation GROUP http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/watercooler/group2009 Cross-referencing enterprise social media with an enterprise directory can increase inter-group communication. As organizations scale up, their collective knowledge increases, and the potential for serendipitous collaboration between members grows dramatically. However, finding people with the right expertise or interests becomes much more difficult. Semi-structured social media, such as blogs, forums, and bookmarking, present a viable platform for collaboration--if enough people participate, and if shared content is easily findable. Within the trusted confines of an organization, users can trade anonymity for a rich identity that carries information about their role, location, and position in its hierarchy. This paper describes WaterCooler, a tool that aggregates shared internal social media and cross-references it with an organization's directory. We deployed WaterCooler in a large global enterprise and present the results of a preliminary user study. Despite the lack of complete social networking affordances, we find that WaterCooler changed users' perceptions of their workplace, made them feel more connected to each other and the company, and redistributed users' attention outside their own business groups. To appear at GROUP 2009. Michael J. Brzozowski 2009-03-17 00:00:00 blogs social media hp watercooler attention GROUP http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/blogging/chi2009 How do you get people to blog at work? blogs attention social media participation CHI The attention economy motivates participation in peer-produced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement. To appear at CHI 2009. Sarita Yardi, Scott A. Golder, and Michael J. Brzozowski 2009-01-20 16:33:00 http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/twitter the social network that matters is not the one you declare. attention twitter social networks social media First Monday Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the declared set of friends and followers. Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu 2008-12-05 15:27:00 http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/predictions popularity, youtube, digg, attention, predicting future downloads. attention youtube popularity social media prediction online content We present a method for accurately predicting the long time popularity of online content from early measurements of user access. Using two content sharing portals, Youtube and Digg, we show that by modeling the accrual of views and votes on content offered by these services we can predict the long-term dynamics of individual submissions from initial data. In the case of Digg, measuring access to given stories during the first two hours allows us to forecast their popularity 30 days ahead with remarkable accuracy, while downloads of Youtube videos need to be followed for 10 days to attain the same performance. The differing time scales of the predictions are shown to be due to differences in how content is consumed on the two portals: Digg stories quickly become outdated, while Youtube videos are still found long after they are initially submitted to the portal. We show that predictions are more accurate for submissions for which attention decays quickly, whereas predictions for evergreen content will be prone to larger errors. Gabor Szabo and Bernardo A. Huberman 2008-11-03 15:27:00 http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/watercooler Visibility, attention, and recognition drive participation in internal corporate social media. watercooler blogs attention social media hp CSCW Blogs, wikis, and forums can break down geographic distances, workgroup boundaries, and organizational hierarchy in an organization. While these tools significantly lower the barriers to producing content, employees may perceive there to be little incentive to invest their own time in providing this content for public consumption. We found that increasing visibility often motivated employees to participate and contribute content. Employees were motivated by the opportunity for attention, and the ways in which social media tools enabled or hindered this opportunity influenced the way it was used. In this paper, we describe the design and use of the internal social media platforms at Hewlett-Packard and examine the ways that employees used these tools. Specifically, we explore ways in which designing for increased visibility and providing opportunities for recognition improve the ways that social media platforms can be used in organizations. To appear at CSCW 2008 Workshop on Enterprise 3.0. Michael J. Brzozowski and Sarita Yardi 2008-10-13 15:27:00 http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/crowd/crowd.pdf How to solve the digital commons dilemma. attention social networks reputation crowdsourcing The tragedy of the digital commons does not seem to prevent the copious voluntary production of content that one witnesses in the web. We show through an analysis of a massive data set from Youtube that the productivity exhibited in crowdsourcing exhibits a strong positive dependence on attention, measured by the number of downloads. Conversely, a lack of attention leads to a decrease in the number of videos uploaded and the consequent drop in productivity, which in many cases asymptotes to no uploads whatsoever. Moreover, we observed that uploaders compare themselves to others when having low productivity and to themselves when exceeding a personal threshold. Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu 2008-09-11 12:00:00 Dennis M. Wilkinson 2008-04-10 00:00:00 social networks attention opinion formation Online peer production systems have enabled people to coactively create, share, classify, and rate content on an unprecedented scale. This paper describes strong macroscopic regularities in how people contribute to peer production systems, and shows how these regularities arise from simple dynamical rules. First, it is demonstrated that the probability a person stops contributing varies inversely with the number of contributions he has made. This rule leads to a power law distribution for the number of contributions per person in which a small number of very active users make most of the contributions. The rule also implies that the power law exponent is proportional to the effort required to contribute, as justified by the data. Second, the level of activity per topic is shown to follow a lognormal distribution generated by a stochastic reinfo cement mechanism. A small number of very popular topics thus accumulate the vast majority of contributions. These trends are demonstrated to hold across hundreds of millions of contributions to four disparate peer production systems of differing scope, interface style, and purpose. Simple behavioral rules hold across hundreds of millions of contributions to disparate online peer production efforts. http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/regularities/ Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman 2008-01-24 0:00:00 We analyze the role that popularity and novelty play in attracting the attention of users to dynamic websites. We do so by determining the performance of three different strategies that can be utilized to maximize attention. The first one prioritizes novelty while the second emphasizes popularity. A third strategy looks myopically into the future and prioritizes stories that are expected to generate the most clicks within the next few minutes. We show that the first two strategies should be selected on the basis of the rate of novelty decay, while the third strategy performs sub-optimally in most cases. We also demonstrate that the relative performance of the first two strategies as a function of the rate of novelty decay changes abruptly around a critical value, resembling a phase transition in the physical world. http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/popularity/popularity.pdf Whether to use popularity or novelty to elicit attention attention http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/novelty/index.html How does novelty affect the attention of large groups The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among one million users of an interactive website -digg.com- devoted to thousands of novel news stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades within large groups. Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman 2007-03-26 10:00:00 attention http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/attention/index.html Deciding what to display. We introduce an automatic configuration mechanism that generates the most relevant information to be presented to limited attention users of information-rich media. It also guarantees to maximize their total expected utility from the information they receive. A computationally efficient algorithm is used to assign an index value to each information item, which then determines whether or not a given item appears in the top list presented to users at a given time. Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu 2007-01-26 01:47:00 attention