Diseño e impresión de los promoinstrumentos.

Social media spaces are a rich source of information, and benefit from the fact that the users of these spaces provide additional means for locating high-quality content. This section discusses the various ways in which past work has identified social means of finding information in spaces de- signed to support information retrieval with social elements.

Social navigation (Dieberger, Dourish, H¨o¨ok, Resnick and Wexelblat 2000) is involved when people use information from other people to make decisions about navigation. Social navigation is not a novel concept, but rather as a technique that has been in use for as long as there have been hu- mans interacting in any social information space. For example, recommen- dation engines, such as those used on shopping sites like Amazon.com

2.3. BACKGROUND

(Linden, Smith and York 2003) involve using information “left behind” by

users in order to personalise an information space to suit the needs of the user.

Social navigation applies to both physical navigation, as well as to the navigation of information spaces. A frequently cited example of social navigation in the physical world is that of Svensson’s (2000) “path in a forest”: when many people walk through a forest over time, they provide “advice” to future walkers in the form of incrementally wearing a path into the ground. No explicit navigation aids are constructed, but rather the navigation advice is created as a secondary result of users navigating in the first place. This example has an immediate and direct link to the discussion of wear, presented inSection 2.3.5; in this case, the accumulated navigation advice takes the form of physical wear.

Socially-driven information navigation behaviours have taken signifi- cant metaphorical inspiration from physical navigation, and the underly- ing needs that drive physical navigation. Much of this extension of phys- ical metaphor has been driven by the work of Pirolli; for example, the lit- erature provides examples of information foraging and information diets

(Pirolli and Card 1995,1999), information scents (Pirolli 1997, Chi, Pirolli,

Chen and Pitkow 2001); we also find information orienteering (O’Day and

Jeffries 1993).

“Information foraging” is a theory described byPirolli and Card(1995) that describes a tendency of information systems to evolve towards a sta- ble state that maximises the gains of valuable information while minimis- ing the cost of locating and making use of this information.

The analogy between information-seeking behaviour and food-seeking behaviour is echoed by the related concepts of information dietsandinfor- mation scents. Pirolli and Card’s (1999) theory of information foraging de-

2.3. BACKGROUND

scribes information diets as the set of choices that an information seeker makes about which information sources to spend more time on than oth- ers. These decisions are informed byinformation scents: “residue” left by information that can be used to determine the perceived value and cost of the information, as it relates to the goal of the user.

These patterns of information consumption, in which users move from location source to location source in search of the higest value information, guided by their goals, relate closely to information orienteering, a term proposed byO’Day and Jeffries(1993) and extended byTeevan, Alvarado,

Ackerman and Karger (2004), which describes a pattern of behaviour in

which the user performs small, incremental searches as they narrow in on their goal. An information orienteering exercise involves broad-scale initial searches that provide additional constraints that allow the user to find the information they seek.

2.3.6.1 Exploratory searching

Exploratory searches are searches performed with nonspecific goals, which require analyses of multiple sets of information gathered over multiple it- erations. When one searches for the date of Easter in a given year, that search is not exploratory, because a specific answer to a specific question is being sought; searching for information about the Apollo lunar landings

(Wilford 1969) is exploratory, because no specific goal is in the searcher’s

mind when they begin looking into the general topic.

The browsing of a social media site fits the definition of an informa- tion exploration task (Bates 1989,O’Day and Jeffries 1993,Baldonado and

Winograd 1997): a task in which the users look for new information within

a defined conceptual area. Importantly, Baldonado and Winograd note that the conceptual area in which the user is searching for information

2.3. BACKGROUND

may be at any level of granularity; that is, a user may begin searching for new information about a specific topic, the field in which that topic is located, or even (at the higest level of granularity), any new information whatsoever.

When users engage in exploratory searches, they are uncertain about the specific information that they are looking for (White, Kules and Bed-

erson 2005), but have enough of an understanding of the information they

seek to be able to recognize when they have found something that fits their (vaguely-defined) criteria. White et al.(2005) notes that exploratory searching happens both intentionally as well as incidentally to other activi- ties; in social media sites that cover a wide range of topics, the multidiscin- plinary nature of the content provided creates a wide range of opportuni- ties for serendipitous discovery of relevant topic areas, which sustain the searching behaviour.

This notion of exploratory searching builds upon previous work by

O’Day and Jeffries (1993), which classifies searching behaviour into three

modes: a) following a plan, in which users have a specific goal in mind and seek it out following a pre-planned search method; b) monitoring, in which users repeat the same search over a timespan, in order to note what results are new; and c) exploration, in which users follow an undirected exploratory path with no fixed goal in mind .

In the case of social media sites, the behaviour of users is a combination of both the exploration and monitoring modes: when users repeatedly visit a social media site, they are conducting an exploratory search with the goal of finding new results of that search. The search behaviour of social media site users is therefore a fusion of these modes, and may be considered equivalent to an unbounded, monitoring exploratory search.

2.3. BACKGROUND

browsing behaviours; in particular, searches that are undertaken as part of a longer-term investigation mirror the incremental discovery of new information afforded by browsing.