I’m happy to announce a new paper, a departure from my thesis work. It’s going to appear at CSCW 2010, and it looks at people who write product reviews that really look like other reviews. I call them deja reviewers. I’m also happy to report that the note got a best of CSCW nomination. Very cool!

ABSTRACT: People who review products on the web invest considerable time and energy in what they write. So why would someone write a review that restates earlier reviews? Our work looks to answer this question. In this paper, we present a mixed-method study of deja reviewers, latecomers who echo what other people said. We analyze nearly 100,000 Amazon.com reviews for signs of repetition and find that roughly 10–15% of reviews substantially resemble previous ones. Using these algorithmically-identified reviews as centerpieces for discussion, we interviewed reviewers to understand their motives. An overwhelming number of reviews partially explains deja reviews, but deeper factors revolving around an individual’s status in the community are also at work. The paper concludes by introducing a new idea inspired by our findings: a self-aware community that nudges members toward community-wide goals.

Understanding Deja Reviewers. Proc. CSCW, 2010.

Espresso machine image courtesy of Flickr’s jakeliefer.

image courtesy of the Illinois state highway system. thanks!

I recently completed a project examining differences between rural and urban MySpace users. Currently, I have a paper in submission. ssh. This is really just a placeholder for that paper once it’s published (somewhere). I took an quantitative approach, and found the following: rural users have much smaller networks much closer to home, rural users value privacy more and women represent a much greater proportion of rural users. I will write more once the paper comes out.