Pressing Questions of the Information Age:13 Jan 2005
Catalyzing Computer Mediated Collective Action
MARC SMITH
Sociologist, Microsoft Research
The biggest success stories on the web are all the product of large scale collective action. Systems like eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia, file sharing networks, and Usenet are all created by a large population of loosely coordinated individuals. These systems highlight the capacity of information technology, networking, and mobile devices to significantly alter the nature of collective action, common goods, and individual rewards. In this talk I will review some of the recent work of the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group. Projects like Netscan and the Usenet Views rich client are examples of efforts to visualize and illuminate the naturally occurring structures of social cyberspaces like Usenet. The related AURA project is an effort to link online conversations to the objects and locations to which many are related. Using AURA today, users can scan the barcodes on everyday objects in the home, office, or store and gain access to related information and services such as competitive pricing and product reviews. Other kinds of tags, such as tags placed on art or equipment asset tags, can be easily linked to related data through Web sites or Web service interfaces.
DISCUSS
Marc Smith's talk
Recommended Reading
Smith, Marc, Duncan Davenport, Howard Hwa. " AURA: A mobile platform for object and location annotation ", in Ubicomp 2003.
Burkhalter, Byron and Marc Smith. " Inh abitant's uses and reactions to Usenet social accounting data ", in Inhabited Information Spaces, Snowden and Churchill, 2003.
Viégas, Fernanda B., Marc Smith. " Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces ", HICSS 2004. [Best Paper: Persistent Conversation Minitrack]
Fiore, Andrew, Scott Lee Teirnan, Marc Smith. " Observed Behavior and Perceived Value of Authors in Usenet Newsgroups: Bridging the Gap ", 2001.
Fiore, Andrew and Marc Smith. " Tree Map Visualizations of Newsgroups ", 2001.
Smith, Marc and Andrew Fiore. " Visualization components for persistent conversations ", in ACM SIG CHI 2001.
Smith, Marc. " Some social implications of ubiquitous wireless networks " ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, April 200, Vol.4 No. 2
Smith, Marc, JJ Cadiz, Byron Burkhalter , Conversation Trees and Threaded Chats , CSCW 2000.
Smith, Marc and Peter Kollock. Communities in Cyberspace: Perspectives on New Forms of Social Organization . London, Routledge Press, 1999.
Outline of the book .
Smith, Marc. " Invisible Crowds in Cyberspace: Measuring and Mapping the Social Structure of USENET " in Communities in Cyberspace , edited by Marc Smith and Peter Kollock. London, Routledge Press, 1999
Smith, Marc. " Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons " Unpublished manuscript, 1992
Kollock, Peter, and Marc Smith. 1999. "Introduction: Communities in Cyberspace." Pp. 3-25 in Communities in Cyberspace , edited by Marc Smith and Peter Kollock. London: Routledge Press, 1999.
Kollock, Peter and Marc Smith. " Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and Conflict in Computer Communities. " Computer-Mediated Communication , edited by S. Herring. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996.
Smith, Marc, Shelly Farnham, Steven Drucker. " The Social Life of Small Graphical Chats " in ACM SIG CHI 2000
Dave Vronay, Smith, Marc, Steven Drucker. " Chat as a Streaming Media Type " in ACM UIST 1999
Xiong, Rebecca ; Smith, Marc ; Drucker, Steven. " Visualizations of Collaborative Information for End-Users". Microsoft Technical Report, 1999.
Mark Smith Bio
Marc Smith is a research sociologist at Microsoft Research specializing in the social organization of online communities. He leads the Community Technologies Group at MSR.
He is the co-editor of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups.
Smith's research focuses on the ways group dynamics change when they take place in social cyberspaces. Many groups in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.research.microsoft.com/~masmith ). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. He has developed a web interface http://netscan.research.microsoft.com ) to the "Netscan" engine that allows researchers studying Usenet newsgroups to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity.
This research offers a means to gather historical data on the development of social cyberspaces and can be used to highlight the ways these groups differ from, or are similar to, face-to-face groups. Smith is applying this work to the development of a generalized community platform for Microsoft, providing a web based system for groups of all sizes to discuss and publish their material to the web.
Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001.
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