Other Papers and References related to our Digital Government research

• YouTube Research (summarized by Jean Burgess, University of Queensland):http://creativitymachine.net/2007/06/15/youtube-research-gazette/
• http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~terveen/papers/sigir2000.pdf Describes a study comparing the results of several link- and content-based algorithms to expert rankings of web sites. A few points that seem relevant to our work:
  • 1) Given some minimal "pre-screening" (specifically seeding the crawler with URLs that had been grouped together by a human in a node of the yahoo directory), simple link-based algorithms performed as well as complex link-based algorithms.
  • 2) For content-based algorithms, text relevance (text similarity) algorithms performed poorly. Simpler techniques that focused on structural characteristics (size of site and number of photos), however, performed reasonably well.
  • 3) The paper briefly describes heuristics for determining what constituted a "site". Particularly as the techniques in the paper were adapted to broader crawls, these proved to be inherently brittle.
• http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~terveen/papers/uist2000.pdf Describes a system that was based on these findings: This might be useful for thinking about ultimate user tasks. One significant difference between a broad topic-based recommender system and a system that operates over blogs is that some of the concepts like hubs and authorities are more intuitive to blog users now than they were before structured sites like blogs evolved. Specifically, people who create weblogs and wikis seem to often undertake these tasks with the goal of being an authority (providing original content, detailed analysis, etc...) or a hub (lots of links with minimal commentary). While this has probably always been somewhat true of content authors, I suspect that the distinction is more salient to content consumers now as well. It may therefore be possible for visualization tools to leverage this intuition on the part of users.
• http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf Kleinberg paper in which the whole hub/authority idea originated.
• The State of Blogging January 2005 (by Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project)
• Rise of the E-Citizen (Elena Larsen and Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project)
• Online Communities (John Horrigan, Pew Internet & American Life Project)
• Digital TownHall (Elena Larsen and Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project)
• Jones, W., Bruce, H. & Dumais, S. (2001). Keeping found things found on the Web. In: H. Paques, L. Liu, & D. Grossman (eds.): CIKM'01 : proceedings of the 2001 ACM CIKM 10th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Atlanta, GA, November 5-10, 2001, (ACM SIGIR & SIGMIS). New York: Association for Computing Machinery, p. 119-134.