Whoo.ly

Abstract

Social media systems promise powerful opportunities for people to connect to timely, relevant information at the hyper local level. Yet, finding the meaningful signal in noisy social media streams can be quite daunting to users. In this paper, we present and evaluate Whoo.ly, a web service that provides neighborhood-specific information based on Twitter posts that were automatically inferred to be hyperlocal. Whoo.ly automatically extracts and summarizes hyperlocal information about events, topics, people, and places from these Twitter posts. We provide an overview of our design goals with Whoo.ly and describe the system including the user interface and our unique event detection and summarization algorithms. We tested the usefulness of the system as a tool for finding neighborhood information through a comprehensive user study. The outcome demonstrated that most participants found Whoo.ly easier to use than Twitter and they would prefer it as a tool for exploring their neighborhoods.

Hyperlocal Media Architecture

“…Stories of Exile is not too dissimilar from other studies that explored the concept of hyperlocality, i.e. providing well-considered and geographically bounded information that is mostly relevant to local community members [16,32]. However, our study shows that hyperlocality in media architecture introduces additional contextual dimensions beyond geography and time, and that each of these dimensions poses a unique challenge.…”

How are information deserts created? A theory of local information landscapes

“…Accordingly, new categories of research studies can be designed by considering these effects: Comparing people's information behavior before and after deploying a new system given conventional information sources (by focusing on their daily experiences, rather than their behavior regarding a new system). Identifying the amount and types of information that can be complemented in a city by implementing a new system. Designing and developing visual analytics tools that show how information deserts in a city change over time before and after implementing a system (e.g., how does the degree of fragmentation in LIL change? ). Identifying and justifying the position and role of a new system within the existing local information landscape of a city ‐ whether it is an implementation of a complementary system that provides an easy access structure (e.g., Hu, Farnham, & Monroy‐Hernández, ) or a completely new system that provides new information that was hardly provided before. …”