SSM 2008

Social applications are the fastest growing segment of the web. Social media are a fascinating phenomenon because they establish new forums for content creation, allow people to connect to each other and share information, and permit novel applications at the intersection of people and information. However, whereas in the general web search is a critical application that drives usability, social media has been primarily popular for connecting people, not for finding information. While there has been progress on searching particular kinds of social media, such as blogs, search in others (facebook/myspace/flickr) are not as well understood. The purpose of this workshop is to focus the attention of the research community on this emerging topic, and to bring together information retrieval and social media researchers to consider the following questions: How should we search in social media? What are the needs of users, and models of those needs, specific to social media search? What models make the most sense? How does search interact with existing uses of social media? What works and what doesn't?

Areas of Interest

 * Blog search
 * Search in folksonomies / searching tagged data
 * Do tags or folksonomies improve search?
 * Searching Wikipedia discussions and revision history
 * Searching within social networks
 * Expert finding within social information networks
 * Searching social media for information that is timely, reliable, hot
 * Studies of users searching in social media
 * Characterizing and understanding the users tasks
 * New social search applications
 * User tasks for social network analysis
 * Searching online discussions, mailing lists, forums
 * Searching in community help and question-answering environments
 * Interactions between searching and browsing
 * Spam in social media
 * Adversarial interactions such as vote and digg spam