Snurb's blog

Athens.
The cultural convergence session at WebSci '09 continues with a panel composed of Greek musicians, actors, and directors. Electronic musician Konstantinos Bita, who began his work on Ataris and Amigas, reflects on his introduction to digital technology, and the gradually growing importance of electronic networks - using modems at first, and then connecting more directly to the Internet. In the early days, access was often free, but then commercial interests began to build their walled gardens with the aim to enrich themselves; with Web 2.0, Konstantinos believes, a further change will occur which further isolates people and locks them into online pursuits without providing real sociality.

Athens.
Next up at WebSci '09 is a panel session on cultural convergence and digital technology, with representatives of the Greek creative industries sector. The first speaker is PASOK MP Maria Damanaki, though,who notes the importance of the Web and of digital technology for culture and creativity. Any form of human activity which is not expressed in a digital form could even be considered to be obsolete, she says, and there are new horizons for the creators of culture in this digital environment - namely, cultural convergence.

Athens.
Up next in this WebSci '09 session is Barbie Clarke, who shifts our attention to the social side of social media. It's well known that adolescents are using social networking sites to maintain friendships and explore identity, of course; Sonia Livingstone and Mimi Ito in particular have done some important work on this on both sides of the Atlantic. But things are also changing constantly, and further research is needed.

Most social networking research has looked at older adolescents, but children are going online at increasingly younger ages; in developed nations, there are many 10-14-year-olds using such sites for bulding friendships and exploring their identities now, at a time when they are just reaching puberty. Indeed, puberty is an important point - it is a time of transition, not least also as kids change school around this time, and using digital technology and going online may now also be part of this modern rite of passage: this may now be the time that kids get their first mobile phones and/or computers. The London School of Economics' Mobile Youth report found some 59% of British kids using social network sites, in fact.

Athens.
The second and last day of WebSci '09 starts with a session on social networking, although the first paper in this session, by Yorgos Amanatidis, has the somewhat technical title "Kernels for Complex Networks" - we'll see what that's all about... Visual network graph models, apparently, for graphs which represent relational data in an abstract way. Such graophs can be used in the analysis, simulation, and prediction of network topologies, focussing especially on aspects like scaling, clustering, and node centrality.

What can be observed in real networks is the degree distribution: as the Web grows, the average degree is constant, but there is huge variance and no concentration around the average; indeed, we see the small world phenomenon which produces networks with small diameter and strong clustering tendencies (the friend of my friend is likely also to be my friend). Kleinberg, for example, modelled the fact that in small world networks there are not only short paths between nodes, but that these nodes can find such paths effectively using local information.

Athens.
Finally for this first day at WebSci '09, we move to the poster session, which includes our poster on the Australian political blogosphere mapping project; the A1 poster itself is available here, and there's also a brief article to provide further background detail. From the post slideshow that's playing at the moment, there's quite a bit of really interesting stuff here - and all of the posters are also available online.

Athens.
The final talk here at WebSci '09 is presented by Nick Papanikolau, whose interest is in communicating online risk more effectively to users, by drawing on lessons learnt from cognitive science. Online risks may include direct risks from user-to-user interaction as well as more indirect threats through viruses and malware - such threats are generally intangible, and user interface design may help make them more tangible.

Online security is now a concern to everyone, of course, but not everyone has a sufficient perception of the threats and risks which they are exposed to. The potential repercussions, however, are vast, and include the loss or theft of data as well as unauthorised access to it. In the offline world, there is substantial information on how humans perceive danger and risk, and this has been applied in a variety of ways (for example in communicating health risks and other medical advice) - but it does not necessarily translate directly to the online context, because of the comparative lack of tangibility.

Athens.
The next speaker at WebSci '09 is Alison Powell, and she focusses on the debate around net neutrality and the behaviour of net neutrality lobbies in this context. The debate stems from a US court ruling classifying Internet services as information rather than communication services, which eliminated the requirement of common carriage - ISPs would now be able to privilege certain types of traffic or slow down others. This became a major public debate during 2006 and 2007, driven in part by the 'Save the Internet' coalition backed by Google.

Athens.
The next speaker here at WebSci '09 is Wolf Richter, who shifts our attention to the 'dark side' of the Web. He links back to John Perry Barlow's 1996 declaration of the independence of cyberspace, and points out how much in spite of such rhetoric the regulation of online spaces has continued - but at the same time, anti-'piracy' and anti-spam measures have had only a very limited effect. There is also a thriving culture of self-regulation online, of course, with a number of organisations (some with government involvement) having emerged to drive this.

Athens.
The next session at WebSci '09 deals with questions of openness and control. We begin with Imma Rodriguez-Ardura, who connects Web science to marketing and consumer behaviour research. If the Web really poses new marketing paradigms, the marketing modelling for the Web can enrich the Web science field as well.

There are several studies of Web-based purchasing processes, which relate consumer behaviour to a number of factors, attempt to understand consumer satisfaction and loyalty, and address the question of consumer confidence as a determinant of purchasing behaviour. Additionally, classical models for explaining consumer actions are also being applied to the study of online consumer behaviour. And finally, the Web is also perceived as a source of consumer empowerment by providing greater transparency for interactions and information.

Athens.
Finally for this trust and security panel at WebSci '09 we move on to Pavlos Spirakis. He begins by noting that the Web was initially invented as a tool for researchers who trusted one another implicitly, so no security was built in from the beginning. This is no longer the case, of course, and so theer is a need fro privacy protection and for the protection of the freedom of its users. Layers of trust must therefore be engineered into Web technology.

Trust, however, is the belief of one party in another, and distrust is not simply the lack of trust, but the belief that the other partner explicitly cannot be trusted. Such distrust is an important notion in its own right, then. Trust is a relation between two parties, then, is context-specific, and exists in varying degrees of strength. This means that trust is measurable, Pavlos suggests, and that it can be expressed mathematically (algorithms such as Google's PageRank build on this).