Joachim Griesbaum

Quality in Blogs: How to Find the Best User Generated Content

As the popularity of weblogging continues to grow, the automatic quality assessment of user generated content shifts more and more into the focus of scientific and commercial discussions. This paper examines Web Mining and machine learning methods for these purposes. Based on automatically detectable features, various blog-specific quality models are trained using machine learning methods. Data from several thousand blogs in three languages has been collected. Along with the assessment of their efficiency, the most useful attributes are identified. Thus, this work points at the characteristics of high-quality blogs and develops basic ideas for their automatic analysis.

Perception and effectiveness of search advertising on smartphones

This paper explores the perception and effectiveness of mobile search ads from the perspective of users. The study investigates the attention and interaction of users as well as their subjective estimation of paid listings within Google search results on smartphones. During the tests, each of the 20 users has to accomplish four different search tasks. Data collection methods combine eye‐tracking with click‐through analysis and interviews. Results indicate that there is no “ad blindness” on mobile search, but similar to desktop search, users also tend to avoid search advertising on smartphones. For mobile search, ads appear to cause higher usability costs than on desktop.

Knowledge generation in online forums: a case study in the German educational domain

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to get a first approximation of the usefulness of online forums with regard to information seeking and knowledge generation. Design/methodology/approach – This study captures the characteristics of knowledge generation by examining the pragmatics and types of information needs of posted questions and by investigating knowledge related characteristics of discussion posts as well as the success of communication. Three online forums were examined. The data set consists of 55 threads, containing 533 posts which were categorized manually by two researchers. Findings – Results show that questioners often ask for personal estimations. Information needs often aim for actionable insights or uncertainty reduction. With regard to answers, factual information is the dominant content type and has the highest knowledge value as it is the strongest predictor with regard to the generation of new knowledge. Opinions are also relevant, but in a rather subsequent and complementary way....

Information Behavior in the Social Web: An Overview of the German Educational Domain

This paper explores participative Social Information Behavior in the educational domain. The goal is to capture a picture of current information practices in the Social Web. The focus is on the “places” and the scale of the Social Web in the domain, the communication dynamics and structure of communities and the specificities, quality, pragmatics and success of communication processes. The paper describes the concept and current implementation status of an online analysis approach and system that tries to answer these questions. Furthermore, first empirical results are presented. Data indicates that participative Social Information Behavior is of relevance in the domain: The volume of openly accessible user-generated content is impressive. The basic characteristics of analyzed forums suggest that such websites resemble sustainable knowledge building communities. Pre-tests regarding the analysis of communication processes denote that generated content can often be seen as a valuable information resource.