Purpose Social network sites have been widely adopted by politicians in the last election campaigns. To increase the effectiveness of these campaigns the potential electorate is to be identified, as targeted ads are much more effective than non-targeted ads. Therefore, the purpose of this paper...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is twofold: the first aim is theoretical – to review extant literature on academic social networks, while considering current limitations and potential avenues for future research; the second objective is practical – to introduce an illustrative...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to evaluating contributions in collaborative authoring environments, and in particular, Wikis using social network measures. Design/methodology/approach – A social network model for Wikipedia has been constructed, and metrics of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an emergent conceptual framework for examining virtual communities. Design/methdodology/approach – Established theories and models of community, social networks, information exchange, and information sharing behaviours are explored with the...

Purpose – Social relations play an important role in a real community. Interaction patterns reveal relations among actors (such as persons, groups, firms), which can be merged to produce valuable information such as a network structure. This paper aims to present a new approach to extract...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to improve the egocentric search speed for important documents in neighbouring blogs. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a rapid egocentric search scheme that narrows down the search space to more important blogs. To determine which blogs...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent to which the news is discussed in social network web sites. Design/methodology/approach – This article reports a quantitative analysis of the text of 26,953 Windows Live Spaces from September 2006 to February 2007 using a heuristic...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of social network comments to give a broad overview to serve as a baseline for future research. Design/methodology/approach – English comments from a representative sample of public MySpace profiles were examined with...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on a comparative and analytical examination of ten social tagging systems' interfaces and their features and functionalities. The specific objective of the study was to examine the ways in which the user interfaces of social tagging systems...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss new approaches for managing personal knowledge in the Web 2.0 era. The paper questions whether Web 2.0 technologies (social software) are a real panacea for the challenges associated with the management of knowledge. Can Web 2.0 reconcile the...