Faculty candidate's talk

First of all, I am not so interested in her research.  One think that got my attention is the lurking signal which people just get the resource they want and don't contribute to the resource.  I wonder how she measures the level of lurking signal.  I frequently check some specific forums and found a very interesting problem.  I call it "do your research".  Some discussion topics are very popular and accumulate about couple hundreds responses.  But some users still post fundamental questions which already have been answered.  People who already know the answer tend to not answer these kinds of questions. They may reply "Do your research".  I think this may be one reason why experts don't wanna contribute their expertise.

Day 1

This is not the first day of my phd life, but I think it is the most important day of it.  This is the first day I learned the meaning of TREK, a very difficult trip.  I never thought that phd is a difficult task, but now I understand.  OK. This is a blog to record my phd life which I am very serious about.  Lets get started.   Today, I went to a speech presented by a faculty candidate.  It is about "How social is the social network?"  This talk is about 3 consequence studies, but different subjects.  The first one is about how users in delicious "tag" others' bookmarks.  She has three hypotheses (possible answers) about this question.  The first one is users will imitate others' tagged results.  The second one is users follow the past tags they did before.  Sorry I forgot the third one.  She found that people in delicious tag the bookmarks which they think are useful for their own personal use.  Sharing and opening the bookmarks to others doesn't mean that the tagging scheme will merge.   The second study is about the document sharing on online shared folder.  She interview 6 groups of people describing the shared folders they used to collaborate with other members.  She found that group members only delete or modify  documents belonged to their own.  This implied that when people manage shared folder, they will manage it in a "social" way.  In the 3rd study, she wanted to know how people manage documents for themselves, for others in the same background, and for others in different background.  She asked participants to create hierarchical structure to manage the documents they think is appropriate for themselves and others.  And she found that there is no difference among these backgrounds which means people will have their own scheme to manage the documents.
Sometimes, social network is not that social although the purpose of the website is to let users  find other users who have the same interests or behaviors.