Using Web 2.0 social software to enhance collaboration and social cognition

People have become social information foragers – spending more time in web-based social networks to share information, communicate, establish bonds, and collaboratively co-create knowledge.

Web 2.0 tools – including blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and social networking – are making significant inroads within the enterprise. The reasons seem obvious: they’re easy to use, and they help people communicate, remember, and make connections. What’s not as easy to understand is how to make them work well.

What are the underlying motivations and interactions that make these tools more effective and useful?  PARC is studying social computing systems to address these questions, and to guide enterprises and startups in designing and optimizing these systems.

PARC researchers are defining a new social computing research area that builds on our pioneering work in information foraging and information scent.   Our researchers define this new research into "augmented social cognition" as the "enhancement of a group of people’s ability to remember, think, and reason."

PARC's approach

• Combines cognitive psychology theories, data mining, and user studies to save our clients time and expense from trial-and-error experimentation;
• Offers advanced prototypes of next-generation web services that we can customize to fit specific needs by working collaboratively with clients and partners.

applications

WikiDashboard: Providing social transparency to Wikipedia

By providing social transparency and enabling attribution of work to individual contributors in Wikipedia, this eventualy will result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

MrTaggy.com: a social exploratory search engine based on social tags

MrTaggy.com uses social bookmarks that have been left behind by web users in various bookmarking sites as navigational signposts for interesting, socially vetted content. The system uses relevance feedback to enable users to explore a topic area quickly and efficiently.

SparTag.us: Lowering the interaction cost of tagging systems

Tagging systems have become important ways for people to organize information gathered from the Web. However, despite popularity among early adopters, tagging still incurs a relatively high interaction cost for people who want to take advantage of others' tags. SparTag.us uses an intuitive Click2Tag technique to provide in-situ, low-cost tagging of web content.