School of Information faculty, graduates, and graduate students were well-represented at the fifth annual International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, held July 17-21 in Barcelona. This interdisciplinary conference brings together researchers and industry leaders interested in creating and analyzing social media.

Several papers by SI researchers were presented during the conference. Click on the links to read the papers.

Politics: The Party is Over Here: Structure and Content in the 2010 Election, by Avishay Livne, Matthew P. Simmons, Eytan Adar, and Lada Adamic and The Prevalence of Political Discourse in Non-Political Blogs by Sean Munson and Paul Resnick.

Social Filtering: Rating friends without making enemies, by Lada Adamic, Debra Lauterbach (MSI ’09), Chun-Yuen Teng, and Mark Ackerman.

Information Propagation: Memes Online: Extracted, Subtracted, Injected, and Recollected by Matthew P. Simmons, Lada Adamic, and Eytan Adar.

Bias and politics: Classifying the Political Leaning of News Articles and Users from User Votes by Daniel Xiaodan Zhou, Paul Resnick, and Qiaozhu Mei.

User sourcing: Culture Matters: A Survey Study of Social Q&A Behavior by Jiang Yang, Meredith Ringel Morris, Jaime Teevan, Lada A. Adamic, Mark S. Ackerman.

Interactions: Center of Attention: How Facebook Users Allocate Attention across Friends by Lars Backstrom, Eytan Bakshy, Jon Kleinberg, Thomas M. Lento, Itamar Rosenn.

Eytan Adar and Qiaozhu Mei are assistant professors in the School of Information; Lada Adamic is associate professor; Mark Ackerman and Paul Resnick are professors. Sean Munson, Matthew Simmons, Chen-Yuen Teng, Jiang Yang, and Daniel Xiaodan Zhou are PhD students in the School of Information; Eytan Bakshy recently received his Ph.D. from the School of Information; Avishay Livne is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The School of Information co-sponsored the conference.

Barcelona image courtesy of Thomas Quine, creative commons license.