Towards Social Information Seeking and Interaction on the Web

Abstract

User generated content is one of the key concepts of the social web (a. k. a “Web 2.0”) and enables users to search and interact with information that has been created (e.g. blogs) or annotated by other users (e.g. in tagging systems). Consequently, information seeking and interaction have been extended by a social dimension. The interaction can be social in so far that user generated content is searched and retrieved or, in a more direct manner that social interactions are carried out before, during or after search by communicating through Web 2.0 features like (micro-)blog posts, comments, and ratings. This paper focuses on social interactions during the search process by combining a model introduced by Shneiderman (2002) which attempts to describe human motivation for collaboratively using computers with an explorative model for social search by Evans and Chi (2008).