From Usenet to CoWebs Interacting with Social Information Spaces [Paperback]

Beginning with a brief outline of Usenet's general structure and development over the past few years, the book addresses the problems of exploring virtual communities and distributed information systems in general, and of finding information in electronic information environments. It covers traditional approaches such as information filtering, collaborative filtering and information retrieval, outlining their successes and failures, and discusses the prospects of novel approaches such as visualisations of social processes and social navigation.I Introduction to Online Studies and Usenet.- 1 Studying Social Information Spaces.- 1.1 Social Spaces: Online and Offline Conversations.- 1.2 Asynchronous Online Social Information Spaces.- 1.3 Important Attributes of Spaces.- 1.4 Conclusion.- Acknowledgements.- References.- 2 A Standing Wave in the Web of Our Communications: Usenet and the Socio-Technical Construction of Cyberspace Values.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Usenet Origins.- 2.3 The Poor Mans ARPANET.- 2.4 Usenet Is Dying.- 2.5 The Backbone Cabal.- 2.6 The Great Renaming.- 2.7 Usenet Is Not a Democracy.- 2.8 A Democratic Network.- 2.9 Rise of the Cancelbots.- 2.10 The Scientology War.- 2.11 The First Internet War.- 2.12 Usenet Cannot Be Regulated.- 2.13 The Breidbart Index.- 2.14 Conclusion: Assessing Usenet.- References.- II Studying Spaces.- 3 Measures and Maps of Usenet.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Usenet Has Many Dimensions and Can Be Seen at Multiple Scales.- 3.3 Web Interfaces for Social Cyberspaces.- 3.4 Network Analysis of Usenet Cross-posting Patterns.- 3.5 Conclusion: The Benefits of Awareness of Social Context and History.- Acknowledgements.- References.- 4 The Dynamics of Mass Interaction.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 Usenet Organization, Distribution, and Interaction.- 4.3 Data Collection and Sampling.- 4.4 Descriptive Results.- 4.5 Testing the Common Ground Model.- 4.6 Conclusions.- Acknowledgements.- References.- 5 Conversation Map: A Content-based l3"