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Natural disasters, such as hurricanes, have had an enormous social and economical impact on society in the United State and around the world for many years. With the goal of preventing, diverting, or weakening the destructive forces of tropical cyclones, the preparedness of the public plays a major role in the magnitude of inflicted damage due to these storms. Acknowledging the captivating power of social networking and Web 2.0 over society, we present a prototype system which integrates meteorological data along with user generated content with the aim of improving public response by increasing their situational awareness due to such natural threats. The proposed system aggregates storm track and wind analysis data from the existing H*Wind system along with videos taken from YouTube and presents it to the user in Google Earth. A content-based concept detection mechanism is used to evaluate the relevance of the extracted YouTube videos to the storm of interest. The proposed system demonstrates the potential public benefit resulting from the integration of the areas of multimedia content analysis, Web 2.0, and meteorology.

Web 2.0 as a contemporary phenomenon receives considerable attention by IS scholars due to its perceived transformational impact on businesses. This paper critically elaborates on the value creation potential of Web 2.0 for small and medium enterprises (SME). By conducting an inductive study we reveal that SMEs can effectively use Web 2.0 as a means to support customer acquisition, alleviate resource limitations and to maintain customer enthusiasm associated with the customer purchasing process. In case that a high customer convenience is required which is based on the involvement of different parties or on personal service support, there is hardly any Web 2.0 value creation potential. This research contributes to the domain of business modeling by assessing the notion of value in a Web 2.0 setting. It also contributes to IS research on Web 2.0 adoption.

A distributed classification paradigm known as collaborative tagging has been widely adopted in new Web applications designed to manage and share online resources. Users of these applications organize resources (Web pages, digital photographs, academic papers) by associating with them freely chosen text labels, or tags. Here we leverage the social aspects of collaborative tagging and introduce a notion of resource distance based on the collective tagging activity of users. We collect data from a popular system and perform experiments showing that our definition of distance can be used to build a weighted network of resources with a detectable community structure. We show that this community structure clearly exposes the semantic relations among resources. The communities of resources that we observe are a genuinely emergent feature, resulting from the uncoordinated activity of a large number of users, and their detection paves the way for mapping emergent semantics in social tagging systems.

The concept of sustainable development — development which meets the needs of the present generation without depriving the needs of the future generation — has been in the lips of many political leaders, educators, NGOs and green groups. Living in the age of knowledge explosion, we want to receive the most updated information and knowledge. The Web 2.0 revolution provides the best solution to all those hungry knowledge seekers. This paper sheds light on the major resistance and motivations on sustainable knowledge sharing.

This paper investigates the impact of blogging on knowledge processes and proposes a way to manage collective knowledge. Qualitative methods are used to collect data through individual semi-structured interviews, think-aloud protocols, focus groups, and document analysis. Data analysis is pursued with the use of the qualitative software package Atlas.ti^®. This qualitative research contributes to our understanding of how a self-organised group of individuals involved in a temporary joint project in the Kingdom of Bahrain creates, transfers, retains and shares knowledge in a blog and provides insights into the knowledge management processes. It reveals the impact of blogging on knowledge management and examines issues concerned with the individual, the groups, and the organisation. It also suggests strategies on how to improve the management of an effective blog. Findings contribute to the debate on knowledge management processes and provide insights for academics and practitioners who are interested in a new theoretical approach connecting individual knowledge to collective knowledge, as well as to those studying online repositories and new information technology tools for the management of organisational knowledge. Future research should be conducted on how blogs may impact the effectiveness of organisational communication. Empirical research should also be conducted to explain how internal and external bloggers contribute to the development of organisational expertise.

Social networking, through media such as Twitter and Facebook, is changing influence streams on consumer (customer) attitudes and behaviours. The direct and readily available consumer-to-consumer communication, made accessible through social networking, provides a repository of information from one's referent group, as well as an organisation's customer-facing facade. Therefore as connections among customers increase, the customers assume a higher degree of brand control at the expense of corporate marketing efforts to establish a specific brand image. This paper presents the results of interviews with four organisations that have created interactive marketing strategies built upon social networking. These companies are using social media and social networks to create online communities where they can leverage peer-to-peer network influence and use this influence to reinforce or increase a positive brand image.

With the rise of social media, many library and information services have begun to incorporate a wide variety of social media and social networking applications into their systems and services. Among the mainstream social networking applications, micro-blogging, in general, and Twitter, in particular, have gained increasing popularity. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of the application of Twitter in the context of a large public library system. Specifically, this study has sampled, content analysed and categorised a select number of tweets created by a public library system in order to identify and document the ways in which Twitter can be used for various information services and knowledge management practices in public libraries. One of the main outcomes of this study is a tweet categorisation scheme that has a specific focus on the information services offered by public libraries.

It is important for all types of organisations including non-profit organisations (NPOs) to manage knowledge for effective and efficient utilisation of resources. Technology is considered as one of the key enablers of knowledge management (KM) practices but it can be costly to develop and implement in an organisation. With the advent of social media, NPOs such as public libraries have the opportunity to harness the power of technology for KM purposes as it is considered a low cost medium. A study was conducted, using an exploratory qualitative interview technique, in two contrasting public libraries: one is a large urban public library, and the other is a small rural public library. The data were analysed using a grounded theory approach informed by a social constructionist theoretical framework. This paper presents comparative findings from these case examples on their understanding of KM as a concept and their use of social media in management of knowledge. Results show that social media are valuable KM tools in public libraries, not only when directed externally for the purpose of promotion, but also to foster engagement with the public and collaborative work within the organisation.

Online communities (OCs) have become an important source for identifying the needs and problems of users, supporting companies in innovation. This development was fostered by IT/Internet technologies and has also been strengthened through recent social changes in user behavior within "Web 2.0." In contrast to its growing relevance, user innovation activities within OCs are still underexplored. Companies that wish to successfully utilize and integrate innovative OC members into their NPD process need a better understanding of the drivers and changes of user motivation in such communities. In this paper we analyze, categorize and integrate different motivational factors that play a major role here and develop several propositions concerning motivation within innovation communities.

Corporate innovation management geared to long-term success calls for a strategy to grow innovations into a substantial competitive advantage. This, however, coincides with an enormous failure-rate at the market, especially in the field of breakthrough innovations. Hence, in recent times, companies are trying to alleviate the risk of lacking user-acceptance through opening their innovation processes to external actors, particularly customers. The method of integrating lead users is determined by the effective and systematic identification of leading-edge customers, which is considered to be a critical phase within this approach. With the arrival of Web 2.0 applications, there is a huge potential to improve these selection processes. Our research into online communities and weblogs scrutinised the search criteria in an online environment and revealed the following characteristics as crucial factors for the online identification of lead users: being ahead of a market trend, high expected benefits, user expertise and motivation, extreme user needs as well as opinion leadership and an online commitment.

Web 2.0 has transformed the way people obtain, understand, analyse and respond to information from a broad range of sources. Users spend several hours a day to access the Web, browse their favourite sites and respond to invitations from friends and other people to participate in discussions that affect their social and business lives as well as their environmental conditions. In this regard, knowing how to promote public participation and engagement in the early stages of environmental impact assessment (EIA) as well as how to gain public acceptance in the consultation phase of an EIA using the Web is important. This study describes how Hong Kong government departments employ the Web to disseminate information and proposes methods for public engagement using Web 2.0 technologies.

Corporate innovation management geared to long-term success calls for a strategy to grow innovations into a substantial competitive advantage. This, however, coincides with an enormous failure-rate at the market, especially in the field of breakthrough innovations. Hence, in recent times, companies are trying to alleviate the risk of lacking user-acceptance through opening their innovation processes to external actors, particularly customers. The method of integrating lead users is determined by the effective and systematic identification of leading-edge customers, which is considered to be a critical phase within this approach. With the arrival of Web 2.0 applications, there is a huge potential to improve these selection processes. Our research into online communities and weblogs scrutinised the search criteria in an online environment and revealed the following characteristics as crucial factors for the online identification of lead users: being ahead of a market trend, high expected benefits, user expertise and motivation, extreme user needs as well as opinion leadership and an online commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between social media and quality management. Although the development of social media and web 2.0 has had a substantial impact on many management disciplines, the connections to quality management remain largely unexplored. The research question is: How do the advances in social media affect the theory and practice of quality management in industry and organisations? This paper is conceptual and is built on a review of research on social media marketing and management as well as quality management, and a conceptual analysis. Connections between quality management and social media marketing and management are identified and a framework is constructed. The research limitation is that this paper is conceptual and does not present any new empirical data. The implication is that it suggests a new framework for handling quality management and social media marketing and management built on previous research that will be useful for further studies. The framework developed in this paper will be useful for practitioners of quality management and/or social media marketing and management in clarifying the connections and implications of previous research. Although social media profoundly influence organisations and individuals alike, the amount of research on the connection of social media to quality management has hitherto been scant.

We investigate how citizens engage in storytelling on social media. We look at how citizens’ stories about a city’s industrial past are brought forward in a Facebook group. Institutional storytelling neglects parts of the city’s industrial area. We track how users establish a co-created counternarrative by means of sharing fragmented memories (posts) and how this narrative rests in parallel to the institutionalized narrative. Employing a case study approach, we applied a variety of qualitative methods, such as qualitative interviews and participant observation, as a means to investigate social media as a digital space for keeping memories alive. Consequently, we conducted a thematic narrative analysis of the data. Citizens use social media to tell their stories and share memories, and they value the opportunity to do so as provided by the Internet: First, users reminisce experiences connected to blue-collar work and the industrial past. Second, users acknowledge the benefits of post-industrial changes (e.g., less pollution) without devaluating the nostalgia. Third, users wish for the industrial past being included in institutional storytelling. Finally, the Facebook group is a space to vent about perceived conflicts of identity, here the elite, as included in the institutionalized narrative, and the working class, as glossed over. Our study provided theoretical insights on the notion of counternarratives, which get collected coherently when shared in a virtual space. These web-mediated narratives run parallel to institutionalized master narratives. In practice, governing bodies might benefit from these insights into class consciousness and storytelling and include citizens’ narratives in strategic communication.

Web 2.0 technologies provide rich and lightweight online tools that let users contribute with new data. They can associate in social networks, share ideas and information and collaborate together for many kind of reasons, obtaining a community's "collective intelligence". We propose to compute this collective intelligence with a Mobile Decision Support System (MDSS) to aggregate recommendations and use this collective advice to improve the customer satisfaction in decision making situations related with the m-commerce activities.

In this paper, the potential uses of Web 2.0 technologies for the improvement of communication with library clients are examined. Wikis, blogs, RSS, mash-ups and other Web 2.0 tools and services can assist librarians in their efforts to present information online and better connect with their clients, especially the younger generations of Internet users. In three different studies we investigated (1) the familiarity of informatics students with Web 2.0 tools, (2) the computer literacy and Internet use by librarians in higher-education institutions, as well as their assessment of the potential uses of various Web 2.0 tools for interaction with the clients of their library, and (3) the use of Web 2.0 tools on the websites of public libraries in Croatia.

This paper summarizes the methodology and conclusions used on a master thesis that had the research aim of exploring how Web 2.0 and social networks are having an effect on users' information behavior. The method used for the collection of data was a semi structured interview, containing questions constructed according to the issues of Web 2.0 and social networks identified on the literature, along with typical features or characteristics of social networks. Purposive sampling was used to select the interview participants. The method for analyzing data was discourse analysis and a framework of categories was created to present the data in a certain order. This study identified various trends and tendencies in users' information behavior and some future directions for research were proposed. Findings of this type of study provide insights to users' information behavior in information systems, they could contribute to a better understanding of the users and to the design of such systems; this is relevant when it is necessary to build information systems from the point of view of users needs and behaviors, that is, by taking a bottom-up approach.

In order to more fully understand the cultural shifts in technology within and between generations, a sample survey of several public libraries in a rural university community will be analyzed. The following subjects will be addressed and compared on a generational level within this poster presentation: programming, technology—types and usage, and frequency and purpose of visits. A thorough analysis of the data in this case study will provide insight into the changing role of technology use among two distinct generations of library patrons.