Social Bootstrapping and Content Curation: A study of Pinterest’s social community and how it collectively organizes and curates content
Nishanth Sastry, Lecturer
King’s College London, London
Friday, May 16, 2014
2–3 p.m.
Brickyard (BYENG) 210 [map], Tempe campus
Abstract:
The glut of information online has led to a scarcity of attention; users need effective means to acquire and consume content, and increasingly they are turning to social means to corral, filter and highlight interesting pieces of information. This talk will first introduce the concept of social content curation–the collection and organization of content in a social setting—as practiced on sites like Pinterest. I will then present our data- and user study-driven findings on how and why people share their favorite content online, and how it helps refocus our scarce attention on niche-interest content. Finally, I will discuss how Pinterest and other sites which require a strong, cohesive community of users for social cooperation, are bootstrapping strong communities by borrowing links from established social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
This talk is based on papers at WWW 2014 and ICWSM 2013.
Datasets used in this work is available for researchers at bit.ly/social-bootstrapping
Bio:
Nishanth Sastry is a Lecturer (roughly equivalent to a assistant professor in the United States) at King’s College London. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK, a master’s degree from The University of Texas at Austin, and a bachelor’s degree from Bangalore University, India, all in computer science. He has over six years of experience in the industry (Cisco Systems, India and IBM Software Group, USA) and industrial research labs (IBM TJ Watson Research Center).
Hosted by Arun Sen
