Accessing, Analyzing, and Extracting Information from User Generated Contents

Introduction

The Web of the 1990s, identified after as Web 1.0, has been a read-only medium for the majority of users, even if the original idea of Tim Berners-Lee was related to a read-write Web (the first browser, named WorldWideWeb, was also a HTML editor). In 2004, the term Web 2.0 firstly used by Dale Dougherty during a O`Reilly Media brainstorming session has been defined by Tim O`Reilly (2007) as “the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform”. Web 2.0 is characterized by active participation and interaction of users that become Web's authors and can directly create, express themselves and communicate.

The innovative approach represented by Web 2.0 is only marginally related with the availability of a real technological advance in intercommunication technologies, it represents rather a new way of thinking, a new business opportunity that makes it very simple to create and share contents online and transforms every individual user of the Web into a potential producer; in this way, users may express themselves through User-Generated Content (UGC). Examples of UGC range from social bookmarking (e.g., del.icio.us) to photo and video sharing (e. g., Flickr and YouTube), from social networking sites (e.g., Myspace, Friendster, Facebook) to virtual world content (e.g., Second Life), from wikis (e.g., Wikipedia) to social-media blogs (e.g., BoingBoing, Engadget) and podcasting.

Web 2.0 changed, in the last few years, the vision of both personal and commercial websites, moving from large, closed and centralized repositories of static information to dynamic aggregators of heterogeneous contents, integrated into the Internet platform. This trend has been confirmed by the ever growing amount of API users can adopt to integrate their own applications and sites with the most important Web 2.0 applications, like, for example, YouTube or Flickr, implementing the so-called architecture of participation, where user interaction is encouraged in order to add value to the application itself.

Users can be effectively part of the development of Web 2.0 applications, by identifying the set of required features and validating the yet implemented ones, reducing the life cycle of applications and improving their usability, in a development approach known as perpetual beta.

Users interaction with Web 2.0 applications is exploited by Web services developers and providers because it also allows enriching the application contents by means of harnessing collective intelligence expressed by users. Tim O`Reilly (2007) shows how some of the most successful applications, which survived the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, are all characterized by a common property: the integration of users collective intelligence into their information flow. In particular the author presents the cases of Amazon, which obtained most of its success thanks to the books reviews written by users, and Google, whose ranking criteria, PageRank, is strongly based on the assumption that people used to link at most, in their personal websites, interesting and trusted documents.