Session 4 Part 1. Report on Two Sites.

Student: Thomas Harder
Instructor: Prof. Rich Gazan
Course: ICS 691 Social Computing
Assignment: Session 4 Part 1:
Social Capital and Trust Mechanisms

Introduction
In this assignment the student was to compare the social capital and trust mechanisms of two sites. This needed to be two sites that the student had not blogged about or nor visited before. I choose LinkedIn and Slashdot. I also visited Kuro5in, but upon learning that they wanted 5 dollars to post, I changed my mind. Both of these sites are supposedly geared for more professional audiences then purely social networking or entertainment, such as Face book or MySpace.
LinkedIn is aimed at the professional business audience, such as Business, Legal, and Information Technology etc. The aim is allow individuals to keep in contact with their business acquaintances, and to build “Bridging Capital”. The site has four major sections; People, Jobs, Answers and Companies. The People, Jobs and Companies sections are like advanced search features, to find more information about People, Jobs and Companies. The Answers Section allows the user to ask questions about specific topics, and allows users to post answers, much akin to AnswerBag.com. The site allows the user to modify their profile, adding text and an avatar. The site allows a user to see their contacts, they don’t have friends at LinkedIn, and to be able to import and export their contact list. Additionally a user can invite people off of his/her email contact list, providing it is hotmail, to join LinkedIn. Also, users can see and peruse their contacts’ contacts.
Slashdot was originally a site for technology information for the more technology minded individual. Its byline is “News for Nerds”. It has started to develop into a more social website as they have started to add more categories that include none technology related information. This site allows you to ask and answer questions on a variety of news and technology related topics. As Slashdot was originally a pure news site, the profiles are more limited then the profiles at LinkedIn. However, you can have Friends, Foes, and Freaks in Slashdot, and you can see who the friends of your friends are and who the Foes of your Friends are.

Social Capital
Both LinkedIn and MSDN are sites aimed at the working professional. Therefore both sites more aligned to build Bridging Capital rather than bonding capital. The LinkedIn site is geared more for building relationships then the MSDN site. LinkedIn allows the user to see the number of contacts, and the number of contacts’ contacts, in “degrees”. The user is given statistics on how many contacts their contacts have and this forms the users “network”.

The Slashdot site is not geared to build a lot of social capital. The tools are extremely limited, both for creating a profile, managing and communicating with friends and contacts. You can build some “Bridging Capital”, by being able to see the friends of your friend. However, the site is clearly not even at the level of LinkedIn for building “Bonding Capital”. Slashdot does let users create groups, and others can join these groups. As can be seen in the above image, I have joined the .Net Developers group. Allowing users to create and join groups helps developed both Bonding and Bridging Social Capital.

Roles
Social roles are the key related behavioral regularities and distinctive positions that individuals play on a social networking site (Dmitri Williams). Neither LinkedIn nor Slashdot have a tremendous amount of Roles. In Slashdot users can be contributors, lurkers, or moderators. Slashdot has the most interesting moderator role as almost anyone can be a moderator. The Moderator role is assigned randomly to individuals logged into their accounts, browsing content without an account is allowed, and is granted the right to moderate for a brief period of time. This means that they can grant points or take away points during their session. On LinkedIn the roles are contributors and lurkers. There is no moderator role. However, any users can flag a post as being out of bounds, for any particular reason.

Trust Mechanisms
The term trust is used to define different types of relationships between two people (Paolo Massa). There are different types of trust relationships and different types of mechanisms to indicate trust in online social networks. Slashdot and LinkedIn fall into different types of online systems. Slashdot is more of a News site and LinkedIn is a Business and Job networking site. Both sites allow users to post comments and both sites allow users to create list of individual they consider friends and/or contacts. LinkedIn allows users to create a profile with comments about their work activity. Then the user’s contacts can make recommendations about their work efforts. The image below is a highlight from Jon Crump, a Microsoft employee.

Both sites allow users to make comments about answers. Slashdot has a scoring system and only moderators can add or subtract points to an answer. LinkedIn does not have a point scoring system, but the best answers get a star and this travels with the user who made the answer. I haven’t figured out how this is determined.

Both Slashdot and LinkedIn allow the user to avoid negative trust. Slashdot allows users to make anonymous postings. And LinkedIn does not tell users whom flagged their comments as objectionable.

Recommendations
Slashdot and LinkedIn are both very useful online communities. In terms of building social capital both sites are limited; Slashdot more so then LinkedIn. LinkedIn, by definition is a site that allows users to build primarily Bridging Capital. Both sites allow users to make recommendations about other users, and both provide users with the tools to view other users’ contacts and network of users. Slashdot scores answers; LinkedIn only allows for the Best Answer, all other answers are equal. Both sites could improve the quality of their trust mechanisms by allowing users to give points for the answers. These points could then be used to display answers in rank order rather than by time order. This would allow the best answers to “float to the top”. This feature would be very useful in a site where the best answer should be found quickly. Slashdot is a news site and not primarily built to aid in the development of social relations. Slashdot could improve their scoring mechanism making it easier to give points; the system is somewhat clunky, allowing only Moderators to give out points.

Summary
In summary for the assignment, I spent some time on Slashdot and on LinkedIn. Of the two sites, I preferred the LinkedIn site. LinkedIn had more user groups and even though Slashdot is supposed to be more technical, LinkedIn had more interesting technical postings. I was even able to get a question answered that I haven’t been able to get answered elsewhere. You may recognize it as I used it on Answerbag.
Both systems have elements that allow users to build trust. However, LinkedIn has more systems. Both systems have similar roles. Both systems have areas of improvement that could be made to the make the sites more useful in terms of building social capital and trust.

References
Gleave, Eric, Howard T. Welser, Thomas M. Lento and Marc A. Smith (2009). A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ‘Social Role’ in Online Community. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.

Williams, D. (2006). On and Off the 'Net: Scales for Social Capital in an Online Era. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/williams.html

Massa, Paolo (2006). A Survey of Trust Use and Modeling in Current Real Systems. Trust in E-services: Technologies, Practices and Challenges. Idea Group.
http://www.gnuband.org/files/papers/survey_of_trust_use_and_modeling_in_current_real_systems_paolo_massa.pdf

Allen, Stuart M., Gualtiero Colombo, Roger M. Whitaker (2009). Forming Social Networks of Trust to Incentivize Cooperation. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.

Eryilmaz, Evren, Mitch Cochran and Sumonta Kasemvilas (2009). Establishing Trust Management in an Open Source Collaborative Information Repository: An Emergency Response Information System Case Study. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.