Franziska Brecht

Corporate Blogging Today – Usage and Characteristics

In the much-observed field of weblogs, corporate blogs are of particular relevance and interest. This study empirically examines the corporate blog phenomenon by reviewing the blog status of 250 companies from the consumer goods industry. Their blogs – if any – were tested with the help of different variables, such as the location of the company, the blog’s updating frequency or its interactivity. This allowed for testing certain hypotheses, in particular concerning the existence of corporate blogs in certain companies, industries and regions, or whether a blog’s traffic rank depends upon these variables. This survey suggests that a blog’s traffic rank is significantly influenced by the frequency of blog postings and its interactivity features. These factors seem to greatly depend upon the sales volume of a company. However, the data sample at hand suggests that there is not yet a widespread usage of corporate weblogs.

Challenges in Business Case Development and Requirements for Business Case Frameworks

Business cases (BC) are often used to support information systems (IS) investment evaluation. Unfortunately, business case development (BCD) is a complex task, especially identifying and quantifying the benefits of a proposed investment. Although today’s business case frameworks (BCF) support BCD to some extent, they have several limitations

Distributed Performance Measurement and Usability Assessment of the Tor Anonymization Network

While the Internet increasingly permeates everyday life of individuals around the world, it becomes crucial to prevent unauthorized collection and abuse of personalized information. Internet anonymization software such as Tor is an important instrument to protect online privacy. However, due to the performance overhead caused by Tor, many Internet users refrain from using it. This causes a negative impact on the overall privacy provided by Tor, since it depends on the size of the user community and availability of shared resources. Detailed measurements about the performance of Tor are crucial for solving this issue. This paper presents comparative experiments on Tor latency and throughput for surfing to 500 popular websites from several locations around the world during the period of 28 days. Furthermore, we compare these measurements to critical latency thresholds gathered from web usability research, including our own user studies. Our results indicate that without massive future optimizations of Tor performance, it is unlikely that a larger part of Internet users would adopt it for everyday usage. This leads to fewer resources available to the Tor community than theoretically possible, and increases the exposure of privacy-concerned individuals. Furthermore, this could lead to an adoption barrier of similar privacy-enhancing technologies for a Future Internet.

Using Ontologies in an E-Commerce Environment: Help or Hype?

Even though online shopping is becoming increasingly popular, many consumers are still reluctant to buy online, especially when it comes to apparel. One approach to improve adaption is to base e-commerce search engines on ontologies to allow a more intuitive search process. This paper presents the results of an analysis how a sample of online shoppers perceived various ontology-based features in an online shop. The data was gathered in two focus groups with panelists coming from different socio-demographic backgrounds (middle-aged women, students in their twenties). Most of the middle-aged women panelists actively shopped for apparel by means of catalogues. However, across the focus groups, most panelists are very reluctant buying apparel online. Our study suggests that age has a higher influence on the information search behaviour of consumers in online shops than gender. The study concludes with suggestions for adapting ontology-based systems to these findings.