New Issue: Webology on the Sociology of the Web; Geographical Distribution of Blogs in the United States; More Effective Web Search Using Bigrams and Trigrams
Articles:
+ Mystery Meat revisited: Spam, Anti-Spam Measures and Digital Redlining
In order to protect email users from receiving unsolicited commercial email or spam, anti-spam measures building on technologies, such as filters and block lists, have been deployed widely. However, there is some evidence that certain anti-spam measures based on the purported origin of the spam cause unintended consequences related to issues of equity of access, which we term digital redlining. In this article, we revise and expand earlier work looking at secondary effects of anti-spam measures.
+ A Study of Email Spam and How to Effectively Combat It
+ Bridging the Mire between E-Research and E-Publishing for Multimedia Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences: An Australian Case Study
+ Islamic Book and Information Culture: An Overview
+ Geographical Distribution of Blogs in the United States
Blogging has diffused rapidly over the last several years in the United States, but that diffusion has not occurred evenly. In examining the distribution of 191,294 weblogs sampled in November 2003, we find that while blogging enjoys popularity throughout the U.S., bloggers appear more frequently within particular cities. This project indexes American bloggers by three-digit zip codes corresponding to their location, and identifies the demographic factors that appear to encourage blogging. We find that cities with populations that are young, urban, and more tolerant of difference are likely to host more bloggers.
+ Egyptian and American Internet-Based Cross-Cultural Information Seeking Behavior. Part I: Research Instrument
+ Reshaping Digital Inequality in the European Union: How Psychological Barriers Affect Internet Adoption Rates
+ Getting Connected: Can Social Capital be Virtual?
+ More Effective Web Search Using Bigrams and Trigrams
This paper investigates the effectiveness of quoted bigrams and trigrams as query terms to target web search. Prior research in this area has largely focused on static corpora each containing only a few million documents, and has reported mixed (usually negative) results. We investigate the bigram/trigram extraction problem and present an extraction algorithm that shows promising results when applied to real-time web search. We also present a prototype augmented search software package that can leverage the results provided by a web search engine to assist the web searcher identify important phrases and related documents quickly. This software has received favourable feedback in a recent user survey.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
