Twitter is an emerging form of news media with a wide spectrum of participants involving in news dissemination. Owing to their open and interactive nature, individuals, non-media, and non-commercial participants may play a greater role on this platform; thus, it is deemed to disrupt conventional media structures and introduce new ways of information flow. While this may be true in certain aspects in news dissemination such as allowing a broader range of participants, the authors' analysis of the involvement and influence of the different participant types, based on a large tweets dataset collected during the Ukraine's conflict event (2013-2014), portrays a different picture. Specifically, the results unveil that while non-commercial participants were the most “involved” in generating tweets about the news event, the retweets they attracted, a common measure of influence, were among the lowest. In contrast, mass media and sources related to journalists, professional associations and commercial organizations garnered the highest retweets.

The prevalence of mobile applications has revived research interest in examining the issue of how commercial information (e.g., adverts) can be displayed to yield click-throughs. Mixed perspectives are proposed over whether or not adverts should be integrated into the primary media content. By anchoring on the load theory of selective attention, this research proposes that user response (attention) to consistent adverts (i.e., adverts that are contextually consistent with the media content) is contingent on how they are displayed (intra- and inter-pages). This study subjected the worldwide users of a location-based mobile social networking application to random manipulations of intra-page and inter-page advert displays. The findings reveal that controlling for the geographical locations of the users, high click-through counts are obtained when consistent adverts are displayed at the early stage of application interaction (top position of the front page), but the effect diminishes as users scroll down to the bottom of front page and navigate to subsequent pages.

It is widely established that the levels of generalized trust, norms of reciprocity, and identification (collectively known as relational social capital) in a virtual community have a positive effect on a member’s motivation to contribute knowledge in the community. However, little is known on the antecedents of such relational social capital. This study longitudinally investigates the effects of the strength of network ties on the development of relational social capital in a virtual local community in a Southeast Asia country. It also empirically validates the relationship between relational social capital and actual knowledge contribution. Analyzing 98 community members, the author found that the formation of weak ties is significant on the members’ sense of identification with the community, which in turn positively affects their volume of knowledge contributed in the community.

Few industries have suffered more severe disruption by digital technologies than news and journalism. Traditional content creators, such as newspapers, are witnessing their geographical monopolies dissolving into the globally competitive Internet and some of their most important sources of revenue, such as classified ads, migrating to specialized online marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist. User-generated content, such as blogs and online reviews, has increased the supply of content that often competes head-on for readers' attention with professionally produced content.

While mobile apps for smartphones are consistently popular, the most common way for users to explore the Internet is still through the WWW. Websites are however not explicitly equipped with information regarding their location -- an issue for use on mobile devices. With this work we aim at bridging this gap by adding a location layer to websites and letting users browse by nearby websites. We present a mobile demonstrator called Webnear.me. Once installed on the smartphone, users are able to list websites in proximity their location: Near.me. Websites in proximity to another one can be browsed too: Near.this. With our application we strive to give answers to the question of how web content should be tagged with locations. We approach this question with several content- and user-centric location-tagging methods.

In this paper we discuss an interesting and useful property of clickstream data. Often a visit includes repeated views of the same page. We show that in three real datasets, sampled from the websites of technology and consulting groups and a news broadcaster, page repetitions occur for the majority as a very specific structure, namely in the form of nested palindromes. This can be explained by the widespread use of features which are available in any web browser: the "refresh" and "back" buttons. Among the types of patterns which can be mined from sequence data, many either stumble if symbol repetitions are involved, or else fail to capture interesting aspects related to symbol repetitions. In an attempt to remedy this, we characterize the palindromic structures, and discuss possible ways of making use of them. One way is to pre-process the sequence data by explicitly inserting these structures, in order to obtain a richer output from conventional mining algorithms. Another application we discuss is to use the information directly, in order to analyze certain aspects of the website under study. We also provide the simple linear-time algorithm which we developed to identify and extract the structures from our data.

The growing popularity of location-based services for mobile smartphones requires web content to be assigned with location tags. In this paper we propose a simple yet powerful approach that assigns location information tags to online content that hasn't been originally assigned with such. The novel method first assesses if the content has any location-based relevance and then assigns one or more location tags to it. It is a user-centric approach. This means that instead of analyzing the content itself, it uses the locations from where the content has been accessed from. It is hence universally applicable for any type of legacy online content, like text, pictures or videos. Finally we present a case study with a non location-based question and answer platform, to which we apply our approach and build a location-based, mobile system.

Searching is by far the most popular activity of the Internet users. While the classic Internet search engines have an established business model, with the increasing usage of mobile Internet, the mobile search engines have just started to gain recognition. In this paper, we discuss how to adapt the Internet search engine business model to its mobile counterpart. We first give an overview about the mobile device capabilities, and user surf/search behavior. We then investigate how to take advantage of the mobile devices' unique capabilities to design a truly mobile search engine. Finally, we highlight how the new search engine design can facilitate mobile information browsing and support the business model of mobile search engine.

Technological advancements and market competition in the smart phone business are becoming more evident. In this article, we examine the decisional deliberation of the mobile application operating system (OS), to epitomize the development of the smart phone technology and its market. Specifically, we consider the OS vendor's market strategy, the preferences of individual and corporate buyers and the inclinations of mobile application developers in general when making decisional choices for OS adoption. It is through this analysis of the various factors and their current developments that we seek to inform organizational managers and/or individual developers on choosing the appropriate smart phone OSs. In order to evaluate the smart phone OSs we present a benchmark method based on six dimensions, namely: security, individual and organization buyer choice, market growth, ease of implementation and net revenue.

The increasing popularity of mobile devices has created a need for a dynamic of user interface which can adapt to its environment context. In this paper, we propose a new framework for an effective context-aware mobile web browsing. We first try to classify mobile contexts and propose architecture to estimate the current context of the mobile user. Then we propose a system to create context-aware web pages using existing standards such as cascading style sheets.

Location Based Services (LBS) promise interesting business opportunities. Today, most LBS are either implemented in hardware devices, or downloaded and installed by mobile phone users as software applications. Both approaches lead to scattered markets and hinder standardization. This paper suggests an alternative approach, which is to enhance mobile web-browsers with location information and implement LBS at the server-side. We define the design space for the location enhanced mobile web and present an implementation of a location enhanced web browser for the currently predominant mobile phone operating system, i.e. Symbian S60.