• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.17-35
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• 2010

As the internet has been used widely, many online communities have been appeared. Initially, many users used online communities for communication and information sharing. Recently, users start using online communities for building, maintaining, and extending social networks which they did in offline environments previously. The importance of online community is considered by many scholars and also companies to use it strategically. Therefore many studies have focused on exploring characteristics of online communities. Most of them have emphasized the importance of online community. Few study focuses on dynamics within online community. By using social network analysis (SNA), this study tries to explore dynamics of online community. Specially, By measuring the centrality of online community and tracing its changes, this study investigates how the relationships among participants in online communities have been changed over the time. Findings of this study indicate that, as participants has joined in an online community over the time, an opinion leader is appeared, and her/his power is changed.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.547-559
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• 2010

As web-based online communities are rapidly growing, the agents in the communities need to know their measurable belief of trust for safe and successful interactions. In this paper, we propose a computational model of trust resulting from available feedbacks in online communities. The notion of trust can be defined as an aggregation of consensus given a set of past interactions. The average trust of an agent further represents the center of gravity of the distribution of its trustworthiness and untrustworthiness. Furthermore, we precisely describe the relationships among reputation, trust and average trust through concrete examples showing their computations. We apply our trust model to online social networks in order to show how trust mechanisms are involved in the rational purchasing decision-making of buyers and sellers, and we summarize our simulation results.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.45-68
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• 2024

Purpose This paper examines the role of local market-based communities in driving regional revitalization, using detailed analysis of online networks. We aim to dissect a local community's communication network, highlighting members with high engagement levels and exploring their characteristics. Our goal is to identify the conditions that allow local community networks to grow independently and to demonstrate how the activation of these networks contributes to regional revitalization. Design/methodology/approach We employ a mixed-methods approach, combining social network analysis with statistical techniques to investigate the structure of online communication networks. Specifically, we use ANOVA to determine the statistical significance of our findings, ensuring their reliability. To complement our quantitative data, we include qualitative insights from interviews, adding depth and context to our analysis. Findings Our results show that individuals with high centrality in the online network are crucial for maintaining active local communities. We find that leveraging local resources to create a supportive and adaptable environment is essential for the communities' sustainability and expansion. Importantly, our research draws a direct connection between the vitality of local community networks and the broader process of regional revitalization. We argue that energizing local communities is an effective way to address the risk of regional decline. By integrating quantitative analysis with qualitative feedback, this study contributes to the understanding of local market-based communities as key drivers of regional development. It emphasizes the importance of building vibrant, resourceful community networks to revitalize areas experiencing socio-economic challenges.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.97-104
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• 2017

This study explored the potential associations among older adults' online community uses, socialization, and social isolation. Results from the hierarchical regression analysis indicated that the quality and size of personal networks composed of online community members positively influences older adults' socialization and reduces social isolation. However, the frequency of meeting with online community members in offline settings was not significantly associated with socialization. Moreover, the amount of time using online communities indirectly and significantly affected social isolation, mediated by socialization. Results from this study address the positive roles of online community uses in overcoming psychological difficulties among elderly people.

• Informatization Policy
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.3-22
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• 2011

The study of online social movements is basically concerned about the impact of the Internet on the existing social movements. More specifically, researchers have paid attention to changes in participants, leadership style and movement strategies caused by the Internet. Due to the Internet, networks of the individuals who are geographically scattered or a network of networks have emerged as new movement agents. Researchers have also analyzed a repertoire of collective action adopted by the online social movements. The increase in online social movements calls for a new interpretation of the existing social movement theories such as resource mobilization, collective identity and political opportunity structure. There are still a lot of debate about the impact of the internet on social movement and the resulting changes. Not only the early debate of cyber-optimism and cyber-scepticism, many studies done by the mid-range perspective also suggested different arguments on the impact of the Internet. This discrepancy comes from a relatively short history of online social movement study, which leads to a limited number of case studies and a shortage of date accumulations. In the future, researchers need to place more attention on the unique characteristics of different technologies and comparative studies of online social movements. The study should also extend its focus to a wide range of political systems in order to explain the impact of online social movements on political intermediary organizations and the democracy itself.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.71-84
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• 2024

This paper presents a critical analysis of the current application of big data in higher education and how Learning Analytics (LA), and Educational Data Mining (EDM) are helping to shape learning in higher education institutions that have applied the concepts successfully. An extensive literature review of Learning Analytics, Educational Data Mining, Learning Management Systems, Informal Learning and Online Social Networks are presented to understand their usage and trends in higher education pedagogy taking advantage of 21st century educational technologies and platforms. The roles of and benefits of these technologies in teaching and learning are critically examined. Imperatively, this study provides vital information for education stakeholders on the significance of establishing a teaching and learning agenda that takes advantage of today's educational relevant technologies to promote teaching and learning while also acknowledging the difficulties of 21st-century learning. Aside from the roles and benefits of these technologies, the review highlights major challenges and research needs apparent in the use and application of these technologies. It appears that there is lack of research understanding in the challenges and utilization of data effectively for learning analytics, despite the massive educational data generated by high institutions. Also due to the growing importance of LA, there appears to be a serious lack of academic research that explore the application and impact of LA in high institution, especially in the context of informal online social network learning. In addition, high institution managers seem not to understand the emerging trends of LA which could be useful in the running of higher education. Though LA is viewed as a complex and expensive technology that will culturally change the future of high institution, the question that comes to mind is whether the use of LA in relation to informal learning in online social network is really what is expected? A study to analyze and evaluate the elements that influence high usage of OSN is also needed in the African context. It is high time African Universities paid attention to the application and use of these technologies to create a simplified learning approach occasioned by the use of these technologies.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartC
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• v.17C no.1
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• pp.15-26
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• 2010

Social Networks such as 'Facebook' and 'Myspace' are regarded as useful tools for people to share interests and maintain or expand relationships with other people. However, they pose the risk that personal information can be exposed to other people without explicit permission from the information owner. Therefore, we need a solution for this problem. Although existing social network sites allow users to specify the exposing range or users who can access their personal information, this cannot be a practical solution because the information can still be revealed to third parties through the permitted users albeit unintentionally. Usually, people allow the access of unknown person to personal data in online social networks and this implies the possibility of information leakage. We could use an access control method based on trust value, but this has the limitation that it cannot reflect the quantitative risk of information leakage. As a solution to this problem, this paper proposes an access control method based on a synthesized metric from trust and risk factors. Our various experiments show that the risk of information leakage can play an important role in the access control of online social networks.

• International Journal of Costume and Fashion
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.15-29
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• 2013

Today's technology enables consumers to trade millions of dollars, conduct online banking, access entertainment, and do countless other activities at the click of a button. Online social networks (OSN) have become a cultural phenomenon that allows for individualistic consumerism. Consumers are increasingly utilizing OSN to share ideas, build communities, and contact fellow consumers who are similar to themselves. The relevance of online communities to the music is immense especially because musicians are now using social media to build global audiences. Not only is information about music and performance disseminated online, but musical commodities are sold and traded online. Online music communities allow consumers to elect and create new identities online through the purchase of subcultural commodities. Given the growing economic importance of online music communities it is important to get a holistic view of subcultural communities online. This study utilized content analysis of online music community websites using the Netnography methodology as developed by Kozinet for data collection to analyze consumers' purchasing and consumption behavior of subcultural commodities online as related to the formation of subcultural identities. Findings showed that subcultural items are predominantly purchased online, especially digital music, and there is a need for more custom craft items. The authors presented a new conceptual taxonomy of online subcultural consumer classifications based on online behavior patterns.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2016.10a
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• pp.196-198
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• 2016

Online social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter are becoming very preeminent, and the quantities of their users are escalating very quickly. Due to the significant escalation of security vulnerabilities in social networks, user's confidentiality, authenticity, and privacy have been affected too. In this paper, a short study of online social network attacks is presented in order to identify the problems and impact of the attacks on World Wide Web (WWW).

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.3935-3949
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• 2021

With the rapid development of Internet and big data technology, various online social network platforms have been established, producing massive information every day. Hot topic discovery aims to dig out meaningful content that users commonly concern about from the massive information on the Internet. Most of the existing hot topic discovery methods focus on a single network data source, and can hardly grasp hot spots as a whole, nor meet the challenges of text sparsity and topic hotness evaluation in cross-network scenarios. This paper proposes a novel hot topic discovery method across social network based on an im-proved LDA model, which first integrates the text information from multiple social network platforms into a unified data set, then obtains the potential topic distribution in the text through the improved LDA model. Finally, it adopts a heat evaluation method based on the word frequency of topic label words to take the latent topic with the highest heat value as a hot topic. This paper obtains data from the online social networks and constructs a cross-network topic discovery data set. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to baseline methods.