TY - CONF T1 - Culture Matters: A Survey Study of Social Q&A Behavior T2 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’11) Y1 - 2011 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Morris, Meredith Ringel A1 - Jaime Teevan A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - collaborative help KW - collective help KW - intercultural KW - QA KW - social search AB -

Online social networking tools are used around the world by people to ask questions of their friends, because friends provide direct, reliable, contextualized, and interactive responses. However, although the tools used in different cultures for question asking are often very similar, the way they are used can be very different, reflecting unique inherent cultural characteristics. We present the results of a survey designed to elicit cultural differences in people’s social question asking behaviors across the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and India. The survey received responses from 933 people distributed across the four countries who held similar job roles and were employed by a single organization. Responses included information about the questions they ask via social networking tools, and their motivations for asking and answering questions online. The results reveal culture as a consistently significant factor in predicting people’s social question and answer behavior. The prominent cultural differences we observe might be traced to people’s inherent cultural characteristics (e.g., their cognitive patterns and social orientation), and should be comprehensively considered in designing social search systems.

JF - Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’11) UR - Complete ER - TY - CHAP T1 - Group information management T2 - Personal Information Management Y1 - 2006 A1 - Wayne G Lutters A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Xiaomu Zhou ED - Jones, William P. ED - Jaime Teevan KW - group information KW - personal information management AB -

 

 

Activities of PIM are often embedded in group or organizational contexts. To work effectively within a group, an individual must manage information not only for his or her personal use but also to share with other members of the group. Obviously, one would like to leverage the activities of others around. Being able to obtain telephone numbers, schedule group meetings, determine the availability of one’s peers, and obtain important collaborative information is invaluable. What are the issues, if any, in leveraging the work of others, in order to incorporate their calendar, contacts, and other information into one’s own PIM system? And what would be involved in sharing one’s own data for use by others? 

This chapter reviews the host of issues involved in the collaborative use of personal information. Topics covered include motivation, adoption patterns, interaction styles, control over personal information, privacy, and trust. The goal is to facilitate sharing personal information by considering these issues; fully considered, they can enable the cooperative adoption and use of tools to support group information management (GIM). 

JF - Personal Information Management PB - University of Washington Press CY - Seattle, WA UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - The Perfect Search Engine is Not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search T2 - Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'04) Y1 - 2004 A1 - Jaime Teevan A1 - Alvarado, Christine A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - David R. Karger KW - context KW - information seeking KW - observational study KW - orienteering KW - search KW - teleporting AB -

This paper presents a modified diary study that investigated how people performed personally motivated searches in their email, in their files, and on the Web. Although earlier studies of directed search focused on keyword search, most of the search behavior we observed did not involve keyword search. Instead of jumping directly to their information target using keywords, our participants navigated to their target with small, local steps using their contextual knowledge as a guide, even when they knew exactly what they were looking for in advance. This stepping behavior was especially common for participants with unstructured information organization. The observed advantages of searching by taking small steps include that it allowed users to specify less of their information need and provided a context in which to understand their results. We discuss the implications of such advantages for the design of personal information management tools.
 

JF - Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'04) UR - Complete ER -