Blogs

Athens.
The final speaker in this session at WebSci '09 is Helen Margetts from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose interest is in what influences people's decision to act collectively (or not). Is it the extent to which others are participating? Related to this is the question of whether use of the Internet makes a difference to such collective action decisions - since it is now possible to know, in real time, how many other people are participating. We can now measure information effects, perhaps for the first time, but what are the appropriate methods for doing so?

Athens.
Next up at WebSci '09 is Ethan Katsh, whose focus is on online dispute resolution. Disputes are a major online phenomenon, and as Fisher and Ury suggested even in 1983, "conflict is a growth industry". Dispute resolution also makes for a very useful case study for Web science, Ethan suggests - and he notes that many of the trends identified at this conference may also cause further disputes.

Last year alone, eBay handled some 40 million disputes (making it 'the largest small claims tribunal in the world'); ICANN handled some 25,000 disputes over its 100 million domain names in ten years, Wikipedia has instituted a broad range of dispute reolution processes and Second Life with its 5.5 billion Linden Dollars in circulation has started to generate a number of virtual property rules to manage its operations. Technology, then, is a great dispute generator, as a byproduct of online transactions and online relationships, but also of the increasing value of information, the brader distribution of information, the growing range of virtual goods and property, the increasing creative activity, the increasing complexity, and the accelerating pace of change.

Athens.
The next session at WebSci '09 focusses on the impact of the Web on government processes and policies. We begin with a paper by Albert Batlle, who notes that e-government studies so far have rarely been interdisciplinary, continue to lack a theoretical basis, still only speculate about the benefits of e-government, conduct studies which focus only on what online elements are available (they are focussing only on the supply side of e-goverment, not the demand side), and may even be guilty of technological determinism.

Albert's own study used instead an interdisciplinary approach, examined new interaction mechanisms and back office processes and their dynamics, studied uses of both explicit and implicit information, and operated on an empirical basis by studying citizen attention services in Quebec, Catalunya, and (the Brazilian federal state) Sao Paulo. The focus, then, is on information flows within public administrations, and examined their implications at Fountain's three levels of institutionalised government processes, public organisations and interorganisational networks, and ongoing social relations in social network interactions. If information flows change at one level, the hypothesis predicts, this will also occasion change at the other levels. What is of greatest interest here is organisational change in government structures.

Athens.
After the rather unruly cultural panel, WebSci '09 has now moved on to the next keynote, by Noshir Contractor. His theme is the application of Web science to social networks, and he begins by noting some of the experimental mobile tools now available for social networking. The Web in general enables us to communicate and collaborate with any one at any time, but what is necessary are tools that enable us to identify who it is that we should be or want to be collaborating with. This is where social network analysis and Web science comes in.

Athens.
The third panellist at WebSci '09 is Olga Pozeli. She says that film appeared in the late 1800s, and was exhibited at first in music halls - the first properly exhibited movie was a comedy. Film and theatre have long been aligned, and film provides a magic spectacle. The use of technological innovations in film and theatre has been artistically and politically justified by many filmmakers and dramatists along the way, but there has also been criticism of this, arguing especially that technologically augmented theatre was in effect apologising for not being film.

Athens.
The next panellist at WebSci '09 is Michael Marmarinos, and he begins by presenting himself as 'a normal human being'. He notes the increasing speed of human communication as it is augmented by the Internet, the Web - and in the face of this, he feels awe, and the enthusiasm of the ignorant. Technology is in conversation with time, and as speed increases, we become smaller.

The speed of change is difficult to assess while change takes place - it may be amazing and scary at the same time. He suggests that the speed of change can be described mathematically as our ability to change divided by the range of possibilities which we can imagine, and this fraction tends towards one (if I've got this right - I do appreciate the live interpretation, but I wish the interpreter would bloody well sit still rather than noisily fidgeting about in her cabin, and chewing gum!).

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.