Social content curation is a new trend which has emerged following on the heels of the information glut created by the user-generated content revolution. Rather than create new content, content curation websites allow their users to categorise and organise collections of content created by others that they find online. These users or content curators provide an editorial perspective by highlighting interesting content.
In this project, we take a broad view of content curation and seek to understand its basic process and then explore how to strengthen and use it. Basically we study the process in three steps:
Everyday, millions of users save content items for future use on sites like Pinterest, by "pinning" them onto carefully categorised personal pinboards, thereby creating personal taxonomies of the Web. This paper seeks to understand Pinterest as a distributed human computation that categorises images from around the Web. ...More
How does one develop a new online community that is highly engaging to each user and promotes social interaction? A number of websites offer friend-finding features that help users bootstrap social networks on the website by copying links from an established network like Facebook or Twitter. This paper quantifies the extent to which such social bootstrapping is effective in enhancing a social experience of the website. ...More
This paper looks at how and why users categorise and curate content into collections online, using datasets containing nearly all the relevant activities from Pinterest.com during January 2013, and Last.fm in December 2012. In addition, a user survey of over 25 Pinterest and 250 Last.fm users is used to obtain insights into the motivations for content curation and corroborate results. ...More
Changtao Zhong, Dmytro Karamshuk, Nishanth Sastry. Predicting Pinterest: Automating a Distributed Human Computation. Proceeding 24th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2015.
Changtao Zhong, Mostafa Salehi, Sunil Shah, Marius Cobzarenco, Nishanth Sastry, Meeyoung Cha. Social Bootstrapping: How Pinterest and Last.fm Social Communities Benefit by Borrowing Links from Facebook. Proceeding 23rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2014.
Changtao Zhong, Sunil Shah, Karthik Sundaravadivelan, and Nishanth Sastry. Sharing the Loves: Understanding the How and Why of Online Content Curation. 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2013.
