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/friendlee/friendlee.pdf Generating the networks that matter We have designed and implemented Friendlee, a mobile social networking application for close relationships. Friendlee analyzes the user’s call and messaging activity to form an intimate network of the user’s closest social contacts while providing ambient awareness of the user’ social network in a compelling, yet non-intrusive manner. To appear in Proceedings of the MobileHCI Conference 2009 Anupriya Ankolekar, Gabor Szabo, Yarun Luon, Bernardo A. Huberman, Dennis Wilkinson and Fang Wu 2009-04-30 17:50:00 social computing intimate networks mobility ambient awareness MobileHCI http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/bundles/bundles.pdf Clusters in social networks can help design customized bundles of products for consumers. Identifying consumer preferences is a key challenge in customizing electronic commerce sites to individual users. The increasing availability of online social networks provides one approach to this problem: people linked in these networks often share preferences, allowing inference of interest in products based on knowledge of a consumer's network neighbors and their interests. This paper evaluates the benefits of inference from online social networks in two contexts: a random graph model and a web site allowing people to both express preferences and form distinct social and preference links. We determine conditions on network topology and preference correlations leading to extended clusters of people with similar interests. Knowledge of when such clusters occur improves the usefulness of social network-based inference for identifying products likely to interest consumers based on information from a few people in the network. Such estimates could help sellers design customized bundles of products and improve combinatorial auctions for complementary products. To appear in Electronic Commerce Research and Applications special issue on Social Networks. Tad Hogg 2009-04-27 21:09:00 social networks electronic commerce essembly EC http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0016 Fans, the law of web surfing and users' interests combine to promote and rate stories on Digg. We describe a general stochastic processes-based approach to modeling user-contributory web sites, where users create, rate and share content. These models describe aggregate measures of activity and how they arise from simple models of individual users. This approach provides a tractable method to understand user activity on the web site and how this activity depends on web site design choices, especially the choice of what information about other users' behaviors is shown to each user. We illustrate this modeling approach in the context of user-created content on the news rating site Digg. (In Proc. of the 3rd Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media) Tad Hogg and Kristina Lerman 2009-04-02 00:39:00 ICWSM digg social media social networks online content popularity 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