International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media: Day 1

Hi folks -- I'm in a conference room in Boulder for the morning session of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media:

Conference organizers.

The morning keynote was given by danah boyd:

I keep calling her the It-girl of social media research, since she seems to be the usual suspect when someone in the media needs a quote about the latest MySpace misbehavior.

She gives a good talk, though I've heard most of her points before. In fact, she gave a talk at AOL's Mountain View offices last year that covers a lot of them -- you can hear it here [podcast link, audio streaming file] -- she focuses on how kids and teens use social networking (and the endless cycle of adults responding to that and the teens adjusting to that response).

There were a few good questions and some sound bites I will try to post later.

The first actual paper presented was: QA with Attitude: Exploiting Opinion Type Analysis for Improving Question Answering in On-line Discussions and the News, Swapna Somasundaran, Theresa Wilson, Janyce Wiebe and Veselin Stoyanov

It's about the textual analysis of people's comments/answers when posting in response to posted questions. Question types included Feelings/Sentiment (how do you feel/are you worried) or Arguing (Should...?)

That's about the last thing I understood.

As I'd noted, this is very much an academic conference; I understand the questions, it's just that the presentations are about methodologies behind the analysis. I don't speak that language (I can't even diagram a sentence).

I'm used to business pitches and people talking about how their products are the next biggest thing.

Anyway, that was just the first paper, and part of the point to coming to these things is to find out interesting research that could be turned into real-life applications. I'm already a few papers behind, but there's a few interesting things going on that I will try to summarize.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: icwsm, social media, conference