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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the status of institutional repositories (IRs) in the South Asian region. The various characteristic features of IRs are studied. Design/methodology/approach: Open directory of open access repositories (DOAR) as a data-gathering tool was consulted for extracting the desired data. Findings: India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh lead other South Asian nations in terms of IRs count. Majority of the IRs are operational in nature with higher number of operational IRs from India. In terms of record count, India leads the list. "Journal articles" outscore other content type and majority of the IRs have OAI-PMH as their base URL. DSpace stays a prioritized software for content management in IRs. Majority of the IRs have not defined their content management policies. English stays a prioritized language of the content dotting the South Asian IRs and majority of the IRs not providing usage statistics. A good score of IRs has incorporated Web 2.0 tools in them with RSS as the preferred Web 2.0 tool. A good count of the IRs has not customized their interface. Majority of the IRs have interface in two languages. Research limitations/implications: The main limitation of the study is that the findings of the research are based on the data collected through the repositories indexed by Open DOAR. Originality/value: The study tries to explore the characteristic features of IRs from the South Asian region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new viewpoint series, Monitoring the Media: Spotlight on Social Media Research, by providing an overview of the key challenges in social media research and some current initiatives in addressing them. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers publication output from disciplines dealing with social media studies and summarises the key challenges as discussed in the broader research community. Findings – The paper suggests that challenges originate both from the interdisciplinary nature of social media research and from the ever-changing research landscape. It concludes that, whilst the community is addressing some challenges, others require more attention. Originality/value – The paper summarises key challenges of social media and will be of interest to researchers in different disciplines, as well as a general audience, wanting to learn about how social media data are used for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – There has been an explosive growth of blog usage recently. However, little research has explored the forces motivating people to engage in blog activities. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the driving forces to engage in blog participation not only includes utilitarian motivation (i.e. perceived usefulness) and hedonic motivation (i.e. perceived playfulness) but also habitual behaviour and social identity (blog identification). The quality of the blog is included as an antecedent to perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 225 valid questionnaires were collected from blog users. Structural equation modelling was used to test the research hypothesis. Findings – The results show that blog users' intentions to participate in blogs are determined by all four key drivers: habit, perceived playfulness, blog identification, and perceived usefulness. Blog quality has an effect on perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness. Research limitations/implications – Previous studies emphasise the importance of perceived usefulness as the key determinant for user acceptance of technology. However, in the blog context this study finds habit, perceived playfulness, and blog identification have more significant effects on users' intention than perceived usefulness. Practical implications – Blog hosts should encourage habitual blog usage (habit), pay more attention to the hedonic nature of the blog (perceived playfulness) and establish a stronger sense of blog identification among participants, in order to retain active users. Originality/value – This study articulates and empirically validates a motivational research model of blog usage, helping researchers to better understand such behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the growth patterns of tag vocabulary in collaborative tagging systems to verify the sustainability and stabilization of tag distributions. Both sustainability and stabilization are essential to the mining and categorization of information driven by tagging behaviors. Design/methodology/approach – The study was based on time series data of CiteULike from November 2004 to April 2010. Power law distributions were detected to reveal statistical regularities and tagging patterns. Logistic regression analysis with time-dependent covariates was conducted to identify the factors affecting the growth of distinct tags for articles. The significance of the effects and the time taken for a given article to reach its tagging maturity were also explored. Findings – Time series plots and trend analysis illustrated the continuous growth of the tagging system. Exploratory analysis of power law distribution fittings indicated a sign of system stability known as scale invariance. Logistic regression results demonstrated that for a particular article, the number of users who tagged the article, the initial date when the article was tagged, and the life span of the article are statistically significant to the ratio of the distinct tag number to the total tag number for a given article. These results confirmed that the distinct tag ratio of an article gives rise to a stable pattern. Originality/value – Though extensive work has been done on the patterns of tag vocabulary, it is not clear how the growth of distinctive tags behaves in relation to the total number of tag applications, considering time-dependent covariates such as the number of users, and the longevity of an article. This paper sets to complement the literature on the existing methodology and investigate this property in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to compare the ease of use and the effectiveness of several interfaces for retrieving tagged images. Design/methodology/approach – A number of participants were randomly assigned to one of four retrieval interfaces: tag search in a search box; faceted tag search in a search box; selecting terms from the tag cloud of all the tags in the database; and selecting concepts from an ontology created from the tags assigned to the images. Each interface was tested by 21 users. Findings – The results show that the highest recall on average was achieved by users of the ontology interface, for seven out of the ten tasks, however, users were more satisfied with the textbox-based search than the cloud or the ontology. Research limitations/implications – The experiment was rather specific, and more studies are needed in order to generalize the findings. Originality/value – With the widespread use of tagging on the web it is of importance to examine whether tagging enables resource discovery. This study shows that in addition to the tags, the retrieval interface also influences user satisfaction and retrieval success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which Web 2.0 applications are prevalent in government web sites, the ways in which Web 2.0 applications have been used in government web sites, as well as whether the presence of Web 2.0 applications correlates with the perceived quality of government web sites. Design/methodology/approach – Divided equally between developing and advanced economies, a total of 200 government web sites were analysed using content analysis and multiple regression analysis. Findings – The prevalence of seven Web 2.0 applications in descending order was: RSS, multimedia sharing services, blogs, forums, social tagging services, social networking services and wikis. More web sites in advanced countries include Web 2.0 applications than those in developing countries. The presence of Web 2.0 applications was found to have a correlation with the overall web site quality, and in particular, service quality. Research limitations/implications – This paper only covers government web sites in English. Emerging genres of Web 2.0 applications such as mashups and virtual worlds have not been included. Moreover the data were drawn solely from the public domain. Practical implications – Decision makers and e-government web developers may benchmark their own efforts in deploying Web 2.0 applications against this study. The numerous exemplars cited here serve as a springboard to generate more ideas on how Web 2.0 applications could be used and harnessed to improve the overall quality of government web sites. Originality/value – This paper unites two research interests: Web 2.0 and web site quality. It also extends previous studies by investigating the suite of Web 2.0 applications found in government web sites around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – In recent years more and more users have begun to use social networking sites (SNSs). Visiting these sites has become a regular habit of many users. However most of the users only use the free services of the sites and are unwilling to pay for services. Therefore, in order to understand what factors affect users' intention to continue to pay for services, this study proposes a research model based on value theory and the academic literature on switching barriers. Design/methodology/approach – An online questionnaire was developed and used to collect research data. The responses of 211 SNS members who pay subscription fees for advanced services were used to test the hypotheses in the research model. Findings – All of the seven study hypotheses were supported. The results indicated that perceived value and service degradation barriers are the main factors which directly influence the intention to pay. Together they account for 37.4 per cent of the variance in intention. Additionally the results demonstrated that sunk costs and lost performance costs both had significant impact on service degradation barriers while enjoyment, social value, and perceived fees were the main determinants of the intention to pay. Practical implications – SNS managers could raise users' perceived value by enhancing the social value and enjoyment of SNSs. In addition they can provide paid members with exclusive member services to increase the barrier. To sum up, in order to increase customers' perceived value, SNS service providers need to understand the real needs of their major customers. These users will be more willing to pay for the services they prefer and feel they need and then recommend that other users use or pay for the services. Originality/value – This study provides a comprehensive framework of the influence of perceived value and service degradation barriers on users' intention to continue to pay for SNSs. The research results could be generalised to other social Web 2.0 services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the roles Web 2.0 applications play in niche cultures such as rock music diffusion. Design/methodology/approach – This paper aims to examine the influence of online forums on fans of rock music and to validate the intermediating roles of the cognitive variables. Findings – The results show that the three factors associated with innovation diffusion theory play different intermediating roles in the relationship between the stickiness of online forums (their ability to make users stay longer and return) and the levels of appreciation displayed by fans of rock music. While stickiness shows a significant positive impact on an individual's perception and image of a rock band, visibility has a significant negative influence on the individual's level of enthusiasm for the band. Research limitations/implications – Additional data and measures are required for in-depth investigations of other cultural contexts. Practical implications – The study could be helpful for determining the influence of online forums on rock music diffusion and for planning innovative promotions and sales strategies for rock bands. Moreover the findings could be applicable to the marketing and promotion of other niche culture items. Originality/value – This study's originality lies in confirming the intermediating roles of the cognitive variables based on innovation diffusion theory between online forums' stickiness and appreciation of rock bands by using a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach and then by showing the opportunities and challenges provided by networking to rock music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Video summarisation is one of the most active fields in content-based video retrieval research. A new video summarisation scheme is proposed by this paper based on socially generated temporal tags. Design/methodology/approach – To capture users' collaborative tagging activities the proposed scheme maintains video bookmarks, which contain some temporal or positional information about videos, such as relative time codes or byte offsets. For each video all the video bookmarks collected from users are then statistically analysed in order to extract some meaningful key frames (the video equivalent of keywords), which collectively constitute the summary of the video. Findings – Compared with traditional video summarisation methods that use low-level audio-visual features, the proposed method is based on users' high-level collaborative activities, and thus can produce semantically more important summaries than existing methods. Research limitations/implications – It is assumed that the video frames around the bookmarks inserted by users are informative and representative, and therefore can be used as good sources for summarising videos. Originality/value – Folksonomy, commonly called collaborative tagging, is a Web 2.0 method for users to freely annotate shared information resources with keywords. It has mostly been used for collaboratively tagging photos (Flickr), web site bookmarks (Del.icio.us), or blog posts (Technorati), but has never been applied to the field of automatic video summarisation. It is believed that this is the first attempt to utilise users' high-level collaborative tagging activities, instead of low-level audio-visual features, for video summarisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Many traditional commercial publishers realise that they need to rejuvenate at least the interface part of their software in order to keep up with the trends in online information retrieval, and information dissemination that cannot be sufficiently limited by the software equivalent of the "No solicitation" and "No trespass" signs. This paper aims to look at the case of Springer and its attempts to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach - The paper focuses on the new version of SpringerLink (launched in August 2010) and other partially free services offered by Springer, the second largest scholarly publisher. The data reported here were collected during the first week of 2011. Findings - The paper finds that many of the Springer services can significantly improve the efficiency of searching the SpringerLink databases. Most can be and should be directly incorporated in an upcoming release of the software. Others need more time for improvement, and to become practical and functional. Originality/value - These recent concentrated in-house efforts by Springer provide a good model for other scholarly publishers and online information services to make their software more state-of-the-art by incorporating useful Web 2.0 features, or simply implementing pre-web functions that have been used only by information professionals because they were user-hostile compared with the gadgets, gizmos, and applets available these days that can do things automatically, smartly and very appealingly, but some of them can also turn out to be a pointless distraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examines the features of an innovative Web 2.0 tool and its applicability in business environments. It also aims to explore the extent for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can be collected and discussed collaboratively in a worldwide community of business process experts through the combination of empirical, hermeneutics, and design research. The study finds that the proposed Living Requirements Space (LRS) platform offers a potential of becoming an international forum for collecting and discussing business requirements for ERP systems.

The article presents a study which analyzes the personalised and social characteristics of open knowledge management based on social tagging in the Internet. The researchers have examined the preferences of respondents and their personalised-social characteristics of enriching content in all aspects of social networking and the association of social-personalized characteristics of social tagging. The study finds that the personalized aspect has enhanced the organization and acquisition of online information and open knowledge in the Web 2.0 environment.

The article presents a study which examines the Web 2.0 concept through the Web 1.0 metrics and the relationships among web audience metrics and Web 2.0-ness degree across web sites. It assesses the degree of Web 2.0-ness among web sites through a three-step procedure and the clickstreams from an online panel with expert scoring of web sites through Pearson and Spearman correlations. It shows that the size of the visitor base of a web site is associated with the average number of page views per visitor, in which the average number of views is associated with the speed at which these visitors consume the content. It also indicates that a web site's degree of Web 2.0-ness is associated with the average number of views and the speed of visitor consumption of the site's content.

The article discusses the approaches for personal knowledge management (PKM) in the Web 2.0 era. The study indicates the multifaceted role of Web 2.0 for knowledge communication, collaboration, sharing, and management. It points out the capacity of Web 2.0 to run a new PKM model through collaboration, networking tools, and formal and informal communication. Examples of Web 2.0 used in organizations such as personalized Web pages, personalized search tools, and social bookmarking are also provided.

The article presents research on the mechanism of Web 2.0 service network's structural evolution. Findings of the study indicate that evolution of the service network adopts the preferential attachment rule though its exponent is found lower than for the other networks after a preferential attachment rule. It points out that the power law distribution exponent of the network is lower than for the other networks although it evolves to a scale-free network. This is correlated with the dependence of the interconnection between nodes on their property.

The article presents a case study which investigates the impact of semantic web technology in digital libraries in Norway. The study examines the impact of the technology on the National Library of Norway's (NL) according to strategic, organisational and technological levels. It discovers that the highest impact of the semantic web is on the NL's organisational level.

The article presents a study which explores essentials of using weblogs for marketing research. The study tries to find out whether system fusion methods can lead to an improvement in the precision of automated opinion detection. It applies several system fusion methods including voting method, inverse rank method (IRM) and linear-normalised score method. It suggests that improvements obtained by these methods can be increased through diversified fusion inputs. It concludes that performance in conducting market research can be enhanced by the fusion of opinion detection systems.

The article presents a study which looks into features and functionalities of the social tagging interface. The study discovers that it is possible to incorporate features of social tagging sites including social bookmarking and social media sharing sites into new social tagging systems. It suggests that added features in the design of social tagging systems including tag use, tag browsing, tag lists, among others should be made in an effort to improve social tagging interfaces. It also describes several areas of social tagging sites including user tagging features, interface layout and exploratory and tag browsing features.

The article focuses on the integration of library resources and services as it relates to Shanghai Jiao Tong University Library in China. The move is supported by MetaLib, SFX and Web 2.0 technologies to meet portal requirements. It entails analysis on the methods to achieve cross searching, ways to enhance resource linking, and integration of library, subject and personalisation services. The research recommends the need for more work to be developed as the analysis is not based on an exhaustive list of portals and as technologies are developing rapidly.

Purpose - A growing amount of information available on the web can be classified as contextual information, putting already existing information into a new context rather than creating isolated new information resources. Blogs are a typical and popular example of this category. By looking at blogs from a more context-oriented view, it is possible to deconstruct them into structures which are more contextual than just focused on the content, facilitating flexible reuse of these structures: that is the aim of this paper. Design/methodology/approach - The paper looks at the underlying structures of blogs and blog posts, representing them as multi-ended links. This alternative representation of blogs and blog posts allows us to represent them as reusable information structures. This paper presents blogs as a popular content type, but the approach of restructuring Web 2.0 content can be extended to other classes of information, as long as they can be regarded as being mainly contextual. Findings - By deconstructing blogs and blog posts into their essential properties, it can be shown how there is a simple and universal representation for blogs. This representation allows the reuse of blog information across specific blog or blogging platforms, and can even go beyond blogs by representing other web content which provides context. Originality/value - This paper presents a novel approach for mapping a popular web content type to a simple and universal representation. The value of such a unified representation lies in exposing the structural similarities among blogs and blog posts, and making them available for reuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to investigate general patterns of tag usage and determines the usefulness of the tags used within university image groups to the wider Flickr community. There has been a significant rise in the use of Web 2.0 social network web sites and online applications in recent years. One of the most popular is Flickr, an online image management application. Design/methodology/approach - This study uses a webometric data collection, classification and informetric analysis. Findings - The results show that members of university image groups tend to tag in a manner that is of use to users of the system as a whole rather than merely for the tag creator. Originality/value - This paper gives a valuable insight into the tagging practices of image groups in Flickr. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper seeks to look at the question of accuracy of content regarding Wikipedia and other internet encyclopædias. Design/methodology/approach - By looking at other sources, the paper considers whether the information contained within Wikipedia can be relied on to be accurate. Findings - Wikipedia poses as an encyclopædia when by no stretch of the definition can it be termed such; therefore, it should be subject to regulation. Originality/value - The paper highlights the issue that, without regulation, content cannot be relied on to be accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]