Just Add Social Noor on social media

For whatever reason, my fervor in blogging SXSW did not carry over to ICWSM, even though I enjoyed ICWSM far more than SXSW.  I’ve considered going back through my notes from the conference and posting my impressions of various talks but that seems a bit futile now that it has been almost a month since the conclusion of the conference.

At any rate, I did want to post some of my impressions regarding the conference, especially compared to last year’s.  As much as I enjoyed last year’s conference, this year’s conference was considerably better!  Compared to last year’s selection, I noticed a significant improvement in the quality of papers presented at this year’s conference.  This noticeable improvement may have been due to this year’s 26% acceptance rate (I’m not sure about last year’s acceptance rate).

Of all the sessions I attended, the set of papers in the psychology session were my favorite.  Two papers come to mind - What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality? and Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes.  In the first paper,  David Evans, Sam Gosling, and Anthony Carroll used a Facebook application to determine if users’ impressions of their own personality matched how their friends perceive them.  They then built a social network site and conducted the same test but with random users, where users made assessments about others’ personalities via their profile information.  In both instances, they found that users tended to understand one another (or put more appropriately - the way that users perceive themselves tended to coincide with how others perceived them). In the second paper, Kristin Stecher and Scott Counts looked at various aspects of online profiles and found that users can generally learn about other users with a minimal amount of profile information (”think slices”).  They also considered the utility of various online profile attributes.  Not surprisingly, profile photos bubbled up to the top.

I’m looking forward to reading the four papers from this session.  Overall, ICWSM 2008 was a great conference and I’m glad I had an opportunity to attend and present.