The recording and sharing of cooking recipes, a human activity dating back thousands of years, naturally became an early and prominent social use of the web. The resulting online recipe collections are repositories of ingredient combinations and cooking methods whose large-scale and variety yield interesting insights about both the fundamentals of cooking and user preferences. At the level of an individual ingredient we measure whether it tends to be essential or can be dropped or added, and whether its quantity can be modified. We also construct two types of networks to capture the relationships between ingredients. The complement network captures which ingredients tend to co-occur frequently, and is composed of two large communities: one savory, the other sweet. The substitute network, derived from user-generated suggestions for modifications, can be decomposed into many communities of functionally equivalent ingredients, and captures users' preference for healthier variants of a recipe. Our experiments reveal that recipe ratings can be well predicted with features derived from combinations of ingredient networks and nutrition information.
Abstract-Virtual goods continue to emerge in online communities, offering scholars an opportunity to understand how social networks can facilitate the diffusion of innovations. We examine the social ties for over one million user-to-user virtual goods transfers in Second Life, a popular 3D virtual world, and the unique role that groups play in the diffusion of virtual goods. The results show that individuals -especially early adoptersare more likely to adopt a virtual good when they belong to the same groups as previous adopters. We also find that groups exhibit bursty adoption, in which many individuals adopt in short succession. In addition, we show that adoption activity within a group depends on the group's size and interactivity. Our work provides insights into theories of social influence and homophily.
As individuals communicate, their exchanges form a dynamic network. We demonstrate, using time series analysis of communication in three online settings, that network structure alone can be highly revealing of the diversity and novelty of the information being communicated. Our approach uses both standard and novel network metrics to characterize how unexpected a network configuration is, and to capture a network's ability to conduct information. We find that networks with a higher conductance in link structure exhibit higher information entropy, while unexpected network configurations can be tied to information novelty. We use a simulation model to explain the observed correspondence between the evolution of a network's structure and the information it carries.
As online social networks expand their role beyond maintaining existing relationships, they may look to more faceted ratings to support the formation of new connections between their users. Our study focuses on one community employing faceted ratings, CouchSurfing.org, and combines data analysis of ratings, a large-scale survey, and in-depth interviews. In order to understand the ratings, we revisit the notions of friendship and trust and uncover an asymmetry: close friendship includes trust, but high levels of trust can be achieved without close friendship. To users, providing faceted ratings presents challenges, including differentiating and quantifying inherently subjective feelings such as friendship and trust, concern over a friend's reaction to a rating, and knowledge of how ratings can affect others' reputations. One consequence of these issues is the near absence of negative feedback, even though a small portion of actual experiences and privately held ratings are negative. We show how users take this into account when formulating and interpreting ratings, and discuss designs that could encourage more balanced feedback.
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