With emerging content forums blurring the distinctions between journalistic paradigms, this study helps illuminate those which best promote alternative practice. A content analysis of Deepwater Horizon oil spill coverage compared three platforms for online citizen journalism: corporate (CNN iReport), alternative (Indymedia), and independent blogs. News stories were coded for sources, links, author-reader interaction, mobilizing information, tone for the liable parties' ability and intent in handling the disaster, and contestation of official information. Results show that Indymedia was the most alternative in inclusion of mobilizing information, critical tone, contestation of mainstream versions, ratio of alternative links to mainstream, and total usage of alternative sources. iReport engendered the greatest rates of community via interaction, while also averaging the highest ratio of alternative sources. The blogs split on nearly all metrics, as one rated highly in every category and the other near last. This analysis determines which platforms are most likely to cultivate disaster news that stands as alternative to, and not extension of, the mainstream. This study makes a contribution to the theory of alternative media and is the first to compare citizen journalism sites against one another in measuring their adherence to the alternative paradigm, and its examination of CNN's citizen-report model also represents a novel contribution. The findings discussed may help direct citizens as they reach out to online communities in times of disaster.

O sucesso da mineração de opiniões para processar automaticamente grandes quantidades de conteúdo opinativo disponíveis na Internet tem sido demonstrado como uma solução de baixa latência e mais barata para a análise de opinião pública. No presente trabalho foi investigado se é possível prever variações de intenção de voto com base em séries temporais de sentimento extraídas de comentários de notícias, utilizando três eleições brasileiras como estudo de caso. As contribuições deste estudo de caso são: a) a comparação de duas abordagens para a mineração de opiniões em conteúdo gerado por usuários em português do Brasil; b) a proposta de dois tipos de atributos discriminantes para representar o sentimento em relação a candidatos políticos a serem usados para a previsão, c) uma abordagem para prever variações de intenção de voto que é adequada para cenários de dados esparsos. Foram desenvolvidos experimentos para avaliar a influência dos atributos discriminantes propostos em relação a acurácia da previsão, e suas respectivas preparações. Os resultados mostraram uma acurácia de 70% na previsão de variações de intenção de voto positivas e negativas. Estas contribuições são importantes passos em direção a um framework que é capaz de combinar opiniões de diversas fontes para encontrar a representatividade de uma população alvo, de modo que se possa obter previsões mais confiáveis. / The success of opinion mining for automatically processing vast amounts of opinionated content available on the Internet has been demonstrated as a less expensive and lower latency solution for gathering public opinion. In this work, we investigate whether it is possible to predict variations in vote intention based on sentiment time series extracted from news comments, using three Brazilian elections as case study. The contributions of this case study are: a) the comparison of two approaches for opinion mining in user-generated content in Brazilian Portuguese; b) the proposition of two types of features to represent sentiment behavior towards political candidates that can be used for prediction, c) an approach to predict polls vote intention variations that is adequate for scenarios of sparse data. We developed experiments to assess the influence on the forecasting accuracy of the proposed features, and their respective preparation. Our results display an accuracy of 70% in predicting positive and negative variations. These are important contributions towards a more general framework that is able to blend opinions from several different sources to find representativeness of the target population, and make more reliable predictions.

User Generated Content (UGC) blir allt vanligare på webben och flera av de mest besökta hemsidorna på internet är till stor del baserade på innehåll skapat av dess användare. Varje dag redigeras exempelvis över 120,000 artiklar på Wikipedia av dess hängivna användare som i snitt spenderar över 8 timmar i veckan på att skapa nytt eller redigera existerande material. Att motivera användare att bidra med innehåll på detta sätt blir allt viktigare. För att kunna göra detta krävs en förståelse för vad som motiverar användarna att bidra. Uppsatsen tar sin utgångspunkt från detta och vi studerar vilka motivationsfaktorer som ligger till grund för att användare skapar UGC samt om det finns några samband mellan dessa motivationsfaktorer. En litteraturstudie över tidigare forskning inom området genomförs och resulterar i 15 motivationsfaktorer kategoriserade i fyra kategorier. Dessa presenteras i en matris som strukturerar upp motivationsfaktorerna i de olika kategorierna. Matrisen med de 15 motivationsfaktorerna ligger som teoretisk grund för en kvantitativ enkätundersökning ämnad att se i vilken grad användare motiverats av olika motivationsfaktorer för skapandet av UGC. Genom enkätundersökningen etableras en förståelse för hur stor andel av respondenterna som motiverats av de olika motivationsfaktorerna. Resultatet från undersökningen används för att studera sambanden mellan motivationsfaktorerna. Detta leder fram till en korrelationstabell som presenterar alla signifikanta samband mellan faktorer samt en motivationsmatris som kan fungera som ett stöd för att förstå och diskutera kring motivationsfaktorer för UGC och dess kategoriseringar. Studiens resultat kan hjälpa utvecklare att ge stöd för flera motivationsfaktorer i tjänster baserade på UGC. Den motivationsmatris och det resultat som presenteras kan även vara utgångspunkt för framtida forskning. / User Generated Content (UGC) is becoming increasingly common on the web and many of the most frequently visited websites on the Internet is largely based on content created by its users. Every day 120,000 articles gets edited on Wikipedia by its devoted users who spend an average of eight hours a week on creating new or edit existing material. To motivate users to contribute with content is becoming increasingly important. This requires an increased understanding of what motivates users to contribute.  In this paper we study the motivational factors that motivates users to contribute with UGC and if there is any correlation between these motivational factors. A literature review of previous research in the field of UGC is performed and results in 15 motivational factors categorized into four categories. These are presented in a matrix that structures the motivation factors in the different categories. The matrix of the 15 motivational factors are the theoretical foundation for a quantitative survey designed to see to what extent users are motivated by different motivational factors for the creation of UGC. Through the survey we establish an understanding to what extent different motivational factors motivate the participiants of the study to create UGC. The results from the survey are then used to study the relationships between motivational factors. This leads to a correlation table that presents all the significant relationships between factors and a motivation matrix that can serve as a basis for understanding and discuss the motivators for the UGC and its categorizations. Our results may help developers to support multiple motivational factors in services based on UGC. The motivation matrix and the results presented may also be the basis for future research.

IPTV is a growing form of distribution for TV and media. Reports show that the market will grow from the current 20-30 million subscribers to almost 100 million 2012. IPTV extends the traditional TV viewing with new services like renting movies from your TV. It could also be seen as a bridge between the traditional broadcast approach and the new on demand approach the users are used to from internet. Since there are many actors in the IPTV market that all deliver the same basic functionality, companies must deliver better products that separate them from the competitors. This can be done either through doing things better than the others and/or delivering functionality that others can’t deliver. This thesis project presents the development of a prototype system for serving user generated content in the IPTV middleware Dreamgallery. The developed prototype is a fully working system that includes (1) a fully automated system for transcoding, of video content. (2) A web portal presented with solutions for problems related to user content uploading and administration. (3) Seamless integration with the Dreamgallery middleware and end user GUI, with two different ways of viewing content. One way for easy exploration of new content and a second more structured way of browsing the content. A study of three open source encoding softwares is also presented. The three encoders were subjects to tests of: speed, agility (file format support) and how well they handle files with corrupted data.

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Background: With the emergence of new social platforms, nascent strategies of Viral Marketing utilizing User-generated Content has developed. TikTok is a new social media based on User-generated videos, where content is mainly expressed in the form of #challenges. Given its nascent nature, marketers lack clear directives of how to capitalize on #challenges by engaging the user base, in their pursuit of reaching virality. As the underlying motivations behind the participation of #challenges are unknown, further research is required. Purpose: The purpose of this study is therefore to explore what motivates Gen Z users to participate in #challenges on TikTok and how companies can utilize these motivations to structure their own #challenges’ in marketing campaigns.   Method: This is an exploratory qualitative study inspired by grounded theory where sixteen semi-structured, in-depth interviews were held with participants classified as Gen Z. Qualitative content analysis was used to develop a revised model of Uses and Gratification Theory.   Conclusion: The results suggests that the Uses and Gratification theory could be used in explaining the underlying motivation for participating in #challenges on TikTok. By drawing connections between Uses and Gratification Theory and empirical data, a revised model was found to include the six traditional forms of motivations with structure as an added seventh prevalent motivation on TikTok. The results propose the motivators factors to participate in a challenge to be intertwined but suggest Entertainment to be a superseding motivator. Suggestions of elements that marketers could implement in their campaigns were thereafter derived.

The paper consists of two essays, both associating customer sentiment with firm performance. The first essay investigates the power of User-Generated Content (UGC) in explaining firm product and financial market performances. The second essay examines how brand equity can moderate a product recall's impact on the announcing firm and its competitors in the financial market. In the first essay, we utilize a high involvement durable product category (i.e. automobiles) as our sampling framework, and our findings confirm UGC's predictive power and help resolve existing ambiguities in existing UGC research. We use a market share attraction model to investigate how UGC contribute to firms' success in the product market. We also investigate the impact that UGC communications exert on the firm's financial performance, by inspecting its influence on firm idiosyncratic stock returns, Overall, We find that UGC communications have a direct effect on firms' success in the financial market. Furthermore, we find that for both the product and financial markets, long term owner reviews influence market responses more decisively than new owners' reviews. For the second essay, we examine the role of customer-based brand equity in moderating the impact of a product recalls on the firms' short-term abnormal stock returns. We construct a sample of all (non-automobile) product recalls announced between January 2001 and December 2006 by three Government agencies, Dow Jones Newswire, and The Wall Street Journal and match these product recall events with firm-level customer-based brand equity measures from the EquiTrend© database. Supporting previous studies we find that product recalls result in sizeable short-term negative abnormal stock returns for the announcing firms. More importantly the results suggest that strong brand equity attenuates the negative impact of these recalls for these firms, while potentially benefiting their competitors. By decomposing the brand equity into brand familiarity and brand quality, the study finds that brand quality is alleviating the focal firms from negative impact of a product recall, while brand familiarity is the driving force behind the benefits of a strong brand for competitors. Overall, these two studies advance marketing knowledge and our understanding of how market intelligence impacts the firm's performance, both on the product and financial marketplaces.

The influx of new digital media technologies and platforms have made it possible for consumers of media products to more easily create and distribute their own works, which breaks away from the traditional production of culture of media by established, professional creators. Consequently, there has been a rise in the immaterial labor of digital media creators, as well as a formation of online communities of disparately connected users through commonly held interests. Within the medium of video games, this convergence between user and producer of content, the tension between control and innovation of media content and form, online communities and immaterial labor is most clearly seen in the practice of modding, here defined as using legally authorized software to modify video game content. Modding for computer games has been occurring since the early 1990s, and has grown considerably due to the expansion of the internet's capabilities for connecting people and distributing large bands of data. In 2012, Skyrim developers Bethesda Softworks released a free software development tool called the Creation Kit. The Creation Kit allowed computer users to modify the game content, at which point the user could publically release their mods through the authorized Steam Workshop Channel. The Creation Kit was distributed via Steam, an electronic digital games store operated by Valve Corporation, Inc. Because Bethesda required users to play Skyrim through Steam, the Steam Workshop Channel was intended to be the primary distribution and gathering location of the modding community for Skyrim. However, most existing modders already had many previously established third-party modding databases and websites for distribution, which meant that the Steam Workshop Channel was a new and forced entry into the modding community. Using a combination of ethnographic methods (participant observation and interviews) and textual analysis of message board data, and in research gathered between September 2013 and January 2014, this dissertation explores the community dynamics of the modders on the Steam Workshop Channel for Skyrim to help locate the identity politics of the community, as well as navigating the tension between innovation and control within the community. It also explores how a digital media producer attempts to control a space of fan-made production, and what that means for the existing community. I participated and observed conversations on modding community dynamics in specific forums on the Steam Community Workshop for Skyrim. There, I gathered textual data from a diverse sample of conversations located on discussion boards and a diverse set of mods ranging in user-defined ratings (high-rated to low-rated) to highlight the conversational dynamics and implicit and explicit structuring of the community. I gathered materials from over 403 relevant conversation threads on the Steam Community Workshop for Skyrim. I also conducted telephone, web and email interviews with a purposive sample group of 15 modders based on their ranking in the community in order to gather their personal motivations for participating in the group and perceptions of norms, rituals and values in the group. Results indicate that modding communities are hierarchized by historically locating the user within the practice, as well as through extensive technical knowledge and frequency of communication. Heavy users and mod creators separate themselves from "non-modders" or mod users through these practices, defining their identities through discourse and the values of creation. The Steam Workshop Channel was a collision between mod creators and non-modder users, sometimes with clashing ideologies that dissuaded heavier users from fully embracing the Steam Workshop. This study illustrates how Bethesda and Valve were perceived by existing modders, and suggests that companies need to pay attention to how historically located communities of users respond to the actions, policies, membership, and moderation of professional media consumers.

This thesis investigates user motivations for creating content that may or may not be added to the game Fortnite: Battle Royale, as well as the user's thoughts about the intellectual property of the content. The thesis also examines the relationship and communication between the Fortnite players and developers, according to the users. The sample was collected from the forum r/FortNiteBR on the social media platform Reddit, where users who were engaged in creating suggestions and concepts for the game were contacted and interviewed. The discussion and analysis distinguishes positive attitudes amongst the users in regards to the empowerment and engagement the participation provides, but also showcases a disappointment amongst the users when it comes to the communication between them and the developers. The data collected display an inconsistency from Epic in terms of which users receive credit or agreements for their suggestions, something that some users have reacted upon. This thesis suggests that aspects such as the crediting of players and the communication between players and developers needs to be improved in order to for the game company to maintain a good relationship with the players.

There is little in the existing literature that provides practical information on the link between co-creation and the internet as well as guidance on how to facilitate cocreation in the online environment. This study sought to address these gaps and particularly the lack of guidance on the practical act of co-creation and the relationship between co-creation and the online environment. A quantitative research methodology with a descriptive design was followed. The data for the study was collected by way of an internet survey. The population for the research was defined as the users of the online cycling social network, www.thehubsa.co.za. A topic explaining the purpose of the study and inviting users to participate was posted on the website. The study revealed the existence of a new two factor solution related to the separate co-creation and Web 2.0 applications constructs. In this respect the Interact and Use components (co-creation) as well as the Creating and Sharing components (Web 2.0 applications) could provide the foundation for construct validity for more comprehensive scales.The ability of a user to Author content on a website was found to be of particular practical importance in facilitating co-creation. Providing this functionality to a customer may be the key to the missing “how to” element of online co-creation. The ability of a social networking website, such as www.thehubsa.co.za, to encourage general product/service usage appears to be the main attraction to advertisers. Advertisers looking to build their brands may not necessarily obtain the same benefits from the website. Findings regarding impact on usage were inconclusive and further research is suggested. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted