The Internet vocabularies of children and politicians

Citation

Schwartz, D.G. (2007), "The Internet vocabularies of children and politicians", Internet Research, Vol. 17 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2007.17217caa.001

The Internet vocabularies of children and politicians

Every so often a paper stands out as breaking new ground in our creative thinking about the Internet and its impact on society. “The Internet vocabulary test for children: preliminary development” by Johnson is one such article. In it we are treated to some fascinating insights into how we should consider approaching the measurement of Internet usage patterns among the very young, and some interesting findings from the first research in that area. Far from the innocence of children is Jackson’s study “Political parties, the Internet and the 2005 General Election: third time lucky?”. It is another fine example of research addressing a relatively unexplored area. What do political parties and politicians choose to tell us through their online presence, and how effective are they at getting their message across? His findings, while specific to the UK, will help shed light on what might be expected in upcoming general elections in the USA, France, and other democratic societies in which the Internet is becoming a central technological platform for promoting a political platform.

The study of Internet banking adoption has been given much attention from the perspective of what influences consumers to engage in online banking. In the pages of Internet Research alone we have seen studies from the UK (Waite, 2006; Jayawardhena and Foley, 2000), Finland (Pikkarainen et al., 2004; Mäenpää, 2006), Denmark (Mols, 2000), Taiwan (Shih and Fang, 2004), Spain (Flavián et al., 2005) and others. However the present study, by Malhotra and Singh, takes us in a different direction. “Determinants of Internet banking adoption by banks in India” examines how the banks might reach a decision regarding the offering of online services. The perspective of the provider rather than the consumer provides us with insights that are important for both the banking industry and developing countries such as India in which banks are now grappling with the decision of when and how to develop their online presence.

Coetzee and Eloff present a “Web services access control architecture incorporating trust” studying how representations of trust levels can be incorporated into the access control policies of a web service provider. The rapid growth of networks of servers offering and sharing web services necessitates better solutions for automatically coordinating the permissions each server is accorded. Their prototype demonstrates how the incorporation of a trust level in an access control policy is a viable solution. Hong revisits the important topic of metrics to measure website success, examining how businesses in Korea use metrics to align their web sites with their business strategies.

The winner of the 2006 Emerald Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in the category of Enterprise Applications of Internet Technology was Daphne Raban. In this issue she presents an overview of her research findings in an article entitled “User-centered evaluation of information: a research challenge”. The annual award is part of Emerald Publishing’s ongoing efforts to encourage research excellence and is awarded in 12 different categories. For a complete list of the 2006 winners see: www.emeraldinsight.com/info/researchers/funding/awards/doctoral/2006winners.jsp and for further details about the 2007 competition go to: www.emeraldinsight.com/info/researchers/funding/awards/doctoral/2007details.jsp

David G. Schwartz