Thesis (M.S.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2009. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 47-05, page: 2453. Adviser: David Kintsfather. Includes bibliographical references (p. 39-40)

Diss.-- Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Cleveland State University, 2010. / Abstract. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 16, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-76). Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center and also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, November, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

A blog webring is a self-organized online network that bloggers can join based on its thematic description. Drawing upon the theory of homophily in interpersonal communication, this paper examines webring themes and explores how they may be related to the salient characteristics in human identity to which people pay more attention in online communication. Research results suggest that blogs in a webring with a mixed theme or a theme based on acquired status are associated with a higher level of conversationality, with more embedded webring-bounded hyperlinks and more member comments. Bloggers from webrings of these two types of themes reportedly have a closer social relationship with other members. They are also more positive about the likelihood of getting social support from within their webrings. In general, people are not constrained by the limited interactivity offered by blogs; many of them employ not only other online, but also offline means of communication for interactions. As webring members, people believe that much more social support is available than they originally anticipated, and the specific types of social support that are perceived to be available are not determined by how easily they may be delivered online. This study overall supports the view that meaningful social relationships are developed and maintained on the Internet, which is essentially an extension of people’s daily lives. It also underscores the necessity that contextual specificity be privileged in future research on people’s online communication. / text

Mobile social applications have emerged in recent years. They explore social connections among mobile users in a variety of novel scenarios, including friend finding, message routing, and content sharing. However, efficiently supporting resource-demanding delay-sensitive streaming applications on the mobile platform remains a significant challenge. Research on such topics will naturally widen the usage of mobile social applications. The solutions to the challenges will provide suggestion on many related work. It is interesting and valuable to explore the system performance and users’ experience in such scenarios. Furthermore, users’ concern about social network is also significant to develop a mobile social network application. It is important to detect users’ strategies to communicate with others. That influences the network topologies and provides biased connections. The strategy consists of various of aspects, most of which are the user preference and user social attributes. Focusing on this meaningful research field, we study collaborative VoD-type streaming of short videos among small groups of mobile users, so as to effectively exploit their social relationships. Such an application can be practically set in a number of usage scenarios, including streaming of introductory video clips of exhibition items to visitors’ mobile devices, such as in a museum. We analyze users’ behavior strategies based on their social preference and social attributes. We design SMS, an architecture that engineers such Streaming over Mobile Social networks. SMS constructs a collaborative streaming overlay by carefully inspecting social connections among users and infrastructure characteristics of Bluetooth technologies. To improve the performance, we analyze the scatternet structure of Bluetooth technology and propose appropriate scatternet structure in our system. We evaluate our design based on prototype implementation on the Android platform, as well as on a large emulation testbed. The results obtained indicate that we are able to achieve a well-performed streaming system in a mobile social network. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

Social Network Sites (SNSs) are increasingly influencing the academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and settings. Although SNS has been claimed that it occupied too much of peoples’ daily lives by many researchers and scientists, the fact also demonstrates the growing use of SNS in education area, which proved that SNS has its unique pedagogical significance and potential to foster students’ learning experience. Used and promoted in many countries around the world, SNS is now not only serving as a social network environment (SNE) for people to communicate, but also a platform for academic information exchange and sharing in various contexts. This study aimed at exploring the differences between western and Chinese localised SNS, evaluating the practicability of SNS use in China’s education, and identifying certain problems in the implementation. Referenced by the literature on SNS experiment in teaching, cultural influence and pedagogy value, Chinese SNS would be analysed from comprehensive perspectives. This study combined two parts, one was the comparison study for four selected SNSs from China and foreign countries, the other was the research experiment conducted with a class of 17 students enrolling in an English educational institution in Chinese mainland, where the students took a spoken English course which lasted for one and a half month. The selected SNSs used in the experiment were implemented to facilitate the teaching and support designed learning process that requires students to explore the use of SNS and motivate them to interact more with peers and teacher off-class while completing the course objectives. Date collection and analysis conducted mixed methods in this research, the data of this research were collected by different levels of participants’ interviews, observations, recordings and questionnaires that covers the perceptions for research topic, everyday use of SNSs, taken-forgranted interactions and communication among teacher and students in the learning and teaching process. This research not only justify the practicability of SNS use in China’s education, it also revealed various functions that SNSs could provide in China’s education. In terms of functionality, it could serves as a platform for (a) facilitating presentation and demonstration, (b) developing personal learning record and portfolios, (c) distributing and sharing resources, (d) promoting student-teacher offline interaction, (e) enabling free comment and feedbacks. Theoretical research would be conducted and practical implementation would also be introduced. Through the experiment, the research would make the best of SNSs in education, which further discuss the special characteristics of Chinese localised SNSs and broaden the understanding of using SNS in education. Pedagogical principles are also discussed. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

No description available.

Web-based social networks have become one of the most popular applications on the Internet in recent years. However, most of the social networks rely on some simplistic trust models to manage trust information of the users, which can cause problems ranging from unsatisfied user experience to exposure to malicious users. This thesis proposes a gravity-based trust model to enhance the aggregation of personal trust information into a subjective reputation system. This new model maps all users on the social network into n-dimensional Euclidean spaces based on their direct trust information, and creates a trust social neighborhood for each user. The reputation of a target user is determined by applying gravity model to the information from both target's and observer's trust social neighborhood. A prototype of this trust model is implemented in order to evaluate the effects of varying different parameters of the gravity-based trust model.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on April 7, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.