Nobuhiko Fujihara

Public opinion channel for communities in the information age

In this paper, we propose as a new challenge a public opinion channel which can provide a novel communication medium for sharing and exchanging opinions in a community. Rather than simply developing a means of investigating public opinion, we aim at an active medium that can facilitate mutual understanding, discussion, and public opinion formation. First, we elaborate the idea of public opinion channels and identify key issues. Second, we describe our first step towards the goal using the talking virtualized egos metaphor. Finally, we discuss a research agenda towards the goal.

Retrieving information on the World Wide Web: effects of domain specific knowledge

In this study, we intend to examine information retrieval behaviors from a psychological point of view using a search engine on the World Wide Web (WWW). We investigated information retrieving behaviors in detail based on both the recorded data of retrievers’ web browsing actions and their thinking processes by the “think aloud” method. We focused on selected keywords for retrieving and compared them between retrievers who had enough knowledge about their task and those who did not. Our goal was to learn about the literacy needed for finding required information efficiently on the WWW.

Creating City Community Consanguinity: Use of Public Opinion Channel in Digital Cities

People moving into cities have trouble acquiring informal information because it is not easy for them to join discussions of the people already living there. We therefore developed an automatic community broadcasting system helping city residents share informal information. This Public Opinion Channel (POC) collects opinions from city residents and broadcasts them continuously. Here we describe the conceptual framework of the POC, a prototype POC system, and the evaluation of that prototype system. The results from a social psychological experiment show that the prototype system helps newcomers express their opinions to a community easily.