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Software spots key players in online communities
    #7206150 -

interesting article, particularly after the recent point system fiasco

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn12310-software-spots-key-players-in-online-communities.html


Software that identifies the most informative people in an online community, based on their posting patterns, has been developed by researchers at Cornell University, New York, and Microsoft Research in Washington State, both in the US.

The researchers worked out how to spot key players within discussions by analysing the connections between thousands of messages on several topics.

The work could help website designers automatically reward, or highlight, the most valuable members of a community, or improve methods for searching through a conversation for the most relevant information.

Previous research has shown that certain people underpin the usefulness of a group or discussion by providing brief but straightforward and useful answers.

"You have a socially recognised role of some people as experts in some way in a community," says Howard Welser, a sociologist at Cornell University, who led the work. "That role was what we were trying to measure. The indicators we found had to do with the structure of their interaction with others."
Simpler method

Previously, other researchers have shown that the key participants in an online conversation can be identified through analysis of the contents of each message (see Software untangles chat room debate). The new work simplifies this process by analysing just the relationship between messages.

Welser and colleagues examined a month's worth of posts from three Usenet newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.matlab, about a mathematical computer programming language; microsoft.public.windows.server.general, about a certain type of computer server; and rec.kites, about making and flying kites.

They rated the content of a total of 5,700 messages from about 450 active users. Then they calculated how often each user replied to messages or were replied to, how often each person started a discussion, and how many posts they contributed to an individual thread. Then, by going through each message and rating their usefulness, they were able to spot patterns in the behaviour of different posters.
'Answer people'

Welser's group found that the most informative individuals – dubbed "answer people" – are also relatively taciturn, rarely participating in discussions heavily. They also tend to shy away from the "discussion artists" who dominate most threads.

Instead, these people mostly post one or two messages to a lot of different discussion threads, and tend to respond to users who do not post a lot. They also tended to avoid long discussions, jumping in when someone had a specific question, providing a useful answer and then bowing out from further talk.

Because the findings use quantitative data about posting behaviour, Welser says they could prove useful for developing automated systems that assigns high reputation to certain people within a discussion. Or, they could make it easier for a search engine to find messages that are most likely to be useful, based on the user.

Scott Golder, at the Information Dynamics Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, US, says the work shows how people take on roles in an online environment, and how those roles influence the nature of the community they take part in. "These guys do really terrific work," he says.

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Re: Software spots key players in online communities [Re: phalloidin]
    #7206166 -

here's a link to the actual journal publication
http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume8/Welser/

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Re: Software spots key players in online communities [Re: phalloidin]
    #7211401 -

Turned loose on the Shroomery and we'd determine myth, cultivation, and scat experts.

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Re: Software spots key players in online communities [Re: phalloidin]
    #7211426 -

i missed the point fiasco, but noticed they arent around anymore...please elaborate on this 'fiasco'

peace

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Re: Software spots key players in online communities [Re: supra]
    #7213243 -

They put a system in place that gave users points for posts, copleting their profile, f@h work, etc.

It was still beta, and nothing too serious and people started using it as currency in the marketplace, making rediculous posts for more points, and bitching if there was a glitch to the point where they removed it all together.

Was never a good idea to begin with.


--------------------
The DJ's took pills to stay awake and play for seven days.

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