Aspects of augmented social cognition: Social information foraging and social search

Abstract

In this paper, we summarized recent work in modeling how users socially forage and search for information. One way to bridge between different communities of users is to diversify their information sources. This can be done using not only old mechanisms such as email, instant messages, newsgroups and bulletin boards, but also new ones such as wikis, blogs, social tags, etc. How do users work with diverse hints from other foragers? How do interference effects change their strategies? How can we build tools that help users cooperatively search? We seek theories that might help us answer these questions, or at least point us toward the right directions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.