Really do university students believe that facebook is a useful tool to mobilizing people both online and offline around social causes?

The use of information and communication technologies pervades our lives. A specific type of social media that is playing a crucial role in this upsurge of participation in cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) is the social networking sites (SNS). We employ an extended model from the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as our theoretical framework to understand student perceptions of SNS use expectations (performance expectancy and effort expectancy), social acceptance (social influence), and their perceptions about resource availability (facilitating conditions) for expressive social participation. This extended model introduces social variables (SNS mobilization effort and offline civic participation) that researchers have identified as important in explaining behaviors. In doing so, it advances a model of how activities in the online domain can ‘spill’ over to the offline domain. We have provided empirical support for the applicability of UTAUT to the expressive participation in CSMs via a survey of 214 SNS users. Our results confirm that expectancy and social influence significantly affect student intentions to use SNS for expressive participation in CSMs. Likewise, SNS mobilization effort emerged as a strong significant predictor of both intention and the use of SNS for expressive participation, but not for offline civic participation. Last, the use of SNS for expressive participation was a significant predictor for offline civic participation, which suggests that users who publicly express their socio-political opinions in SNS are more likely than others to participate in demonstrations.

Really do university students believe that facebook is a useful tool to mobilizing people both online and offline around social causes? from Juan D Borrero

Hyperlink Formation in Social Bookmarking Systems: Who is Who Online?

Social bookmarking systems attract researchers in information systems and social sciences because they offer an enormous quantity of user-generated annotations that reveal the interests of millions of people. In this paper, we explore a different viewpoint to gain an understanding of the social bookmarking systems.

Using data crawled from a large social tagging system we argue that the prominence of a website, as measured by its status or public recognition, also determines its centrality.

To test this hypothesis we predict the indexes of authority and other measures of centrality via Social Network Analysis. We also use Gephi to visualize the networks, and analyze the structure.

The results discussed in the paper come from a sample of 61,043 taggings that involved 3,668 users and 4,913 bookmarked websites from a specific Social Network Sites, Delicious, on the subject of globalization of agriculture.

We find that mass media companies have a competitive advantage in attracting links and user attention.

Hyperlink Formation in Social Bookmarking Systems: Who is Who Online? from Juan D Borrero

The Spanish Revolution in Twitter (1): Hashtags, Escraches and Anti – Evictions social movement in Spain

Old Revolutions and Social Movements used to be diffused to the public with the help of a combination of meetings, assemblies, and also through instruments as pamphlets, posters, by word of mouth, and similar. One very important change began at the beginning of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Web 2.0 based on the developing of Social Networks through the Internet introduced new ways of announce or call any type of protest, meeting, etc. introducing the diffusion by very effective and fast means, on real-time, as Twitter. We analize the use of the hashtag “SpanishRevolution” from all the tweets published in Twitter from 10 April 2013 to 28 May 2013; describe the main other hashtags included in the tweets in which the hashtag “SpanishRevolution” was found; discover the connections between this and other hashtags included in the same tweets, looking for patterns in the micro discourses produced by the hashtags; and determine the patterns and types of hashtags included in the tweets, that is, are the hashtags alluding to slogans, places, people, or to what?

What Happen After Crawling Big Data?

We test a methodology to automatically filtering, coding and reducing the huge amount of data retrieved from Twitter, as a previous task to be done before the analysis of Big Data, and to determine the reliability of the methodology after being applied to a dataset of 500,000 tweets on the ‘desahucios’ (evictions) thematic. We explain the process followed to achieve these tasks. Basically, we extracted a random sample of 1,000 clusters from a dataset of 500,000 tweets around the ‘desahucios’ thematic that was retrieved from 10 April 2013 to 28 May 2013 period. Hashtags on this sample were automatically filtered, codified and reduced according to the Levenshtein distance metric.[1] Different automatic algorithms were applied to the 100,000 sample of tweets for filtering, coding and reducing the number of hashtags. After this operation, a new statistically representative sample of hashtags was selected in order to determine the reliability of the automatic algorithm created. In this last step two researchers manually checked case by case if the hashtags were correctly clustered. Results present all the process and the evaluation of the best algorithm for reducing twitter data on the eviction thematic.

What happen after crawling big data? from jcarpioc

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[1] Informally, the Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (i.e. insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance (retrieved 13.03.2014).

Production of New Knowledge Through Automated Big Data Extraction from Social Bookmarking Systems

Social tagging systems have gained increasing popularity as a method of annotating and categorising a wide range of different web resources. We use big data from Web 2.0 in social research to discover some type of structuration around the issue of the globalisation of agriculture and, particularly, within Delicious. We retrieved a sample of 3,668 users, 2,148 URLs and 4,776 tags, and through social network analysis (SNA), we found out what types of URLs around our topic have been recommended via collaborative tagging, what types of actors label URLs around this topic, whether there is some type of structuration and hierarchy to be discovered in the network of the globalisation of agriculture (centrality, substructures, etc.), and what types of tags actors are using to specifically label (and thus define and qualify) the URLs on the globalisation of agriculture that they recommend through Delicious.

What's happening in Spain?

Institutional change can create opportunities for potential entrepreneurs by shaping and determining the prospects as well as removing or lowering barriers to market entry and/or exit and thus can exert a positive impact on entrepreneurial leadership (Gnyawali and Fogel 1994; Hwang and Powell 2005; Smallbone and Welter 2001). But I think, that's not true in the spanish case.

What's the problem with entrepreneurship? Are the regulatory institutions? Is the contextual embeddedness of entrepreneurship? Are the entrepreneurs?

¿Somos lo que pensamos, lo que decimos o lo que hacemos?

Todos nosotros tenemos fuertes tendencias a tener pensamientos y acciones incongruentes.

Decía Chris Argyris, que los seres humanos tienen dos tipos de teorías en sus mentes: la teoría que defienden (sus creencias y valores manifiestos) y la teoría que de hecho utilizan (teoría en uso) que solo se puede inferir a partir de la observación de su comportamiento.

Hace unos años, antes de impartir un seminario sobre seguridad alimentaria a un grupo de profesionales, coloqué en un lugar accesible para los asistentes, dos platos. Saqué veinte caramelos de una bolsa y los puse en uno de ellos. A continuación saqué otros veinte, les quité el envoltorio y los coloqué en el otro plato. Al iniciar el seminario les hice la siguiente pregunta: Los ingleses se comen las fresas, frambuesas, arándanos, sin lavar, como si fueran golosinas. ¿A vosotros qué os parece? La respuesta unánime fue que muy bien, puesto que estos berries, su producto, están libre de cualquier contaminación y no hay nada que temer. Al final de la charla, les enseñé los platos. Todos los caramelos con envoltorio habían desaparecido. Sin embargo todos los caramelos sin envoltorio seguían estando allí.

Ayer, tras repartir el examen, dejé una pila de folios en blanco encima de una mesa para que quien necesitara papel pudiera ir cogiéndolo de allí. Antes había cogido los dos folios de arriba, les hice un doblez, los alisé y los volví a dejar encima de la pila. Al finalizar el examen observé que la pila de 500 folios había bajado más del 50%, pero los dos folios que yo había “manipulado”, seguían estando arriba de la pila. Eran igualitos que el resto, blancos inmaculados, pero con una leve e inapreciable marca por el centro. Para coger los otros folios había primero que apartar éstos. Vaya trabajo.