Sharing information: for profit, for votes, for collaboration, and for those who might otherwise not see it

Citation

Schwartz, D.G. (2010), "Sharing information: for profit, for votes, for collaboration, and for those who might otherwise not see it", Internet Research, Vol. 20 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2010.17220eaa.001

Sharing information: for profit, for votes, for collaboration, and for those who might otherwise not see it

Article Type: Editorial From: Internet Research, Volume 20, Issue 5

Almost every aspect of the Internet and its abundance of applications relate, at the end of the day, to the sharing of information. It is a sobering thought that after over 20 years of research with the Internet at its center, we are still grappling with how information should be shared. This issue of Internet Research takes us on a journey through number of very different aspects of information sharing.

We share information for profit. Online auctions continue to be a source of revenue growth as consumers and corporations alike discover new pricing and information efficiencies. Yet the precise nature of these efficiencies and the factors that drive consumers to purchase are still far from being fully understood. Two papers in this issue of Internet Research address aspects of online auctions related to the sharing of information. The first, Wu and Wang’s article “Exploring asymmetrical information transmission processes in online auctions”, shows how the value of information made (or not made) available to buyers in an auction process can impact profitability. A better understanding of this phenomenon can lead to more effective pricing models and information sharing behavior. One of the more intriguing auction models that have developed over recent years is the “buy-it-now auction” – somewhat of an oxymoron. Xu, Lin, and Shao shed new light on what drives consumers to participate in such auctions in their article “Factors affecting consumer behaviors in online buy-it-now auctions”.

We share information for votes. The use of the Internet as a participative platform for political activities and electronic governance is one of the most challenging long-term areas of research, on social, democratic, legal, and technological levels. “Tentative steps towards interaction: the use of the Internet in the British European Parliament Election 2009” by Jackson and Lilleker, examines recent developments through the theoretical lenses of monologue versus dialogue; and normalization versus equalization to provide us with important insights into the growing impact of Web 2.0 applications to gather and transmit information in the political arena.

We share information for collaboration. How are supply-chain relationships changing? How should organizations prepare themselves for different inter-organizational relationships? In “Understanding the role of electronic trading and inter-organisational cooperation and coordination: a conceptual matrix framework”, Fearon, Ballantine, and Philip begin to address these and other questions by examining the social network literature alongside recent research in electronic market and hierarchy coordination. The result is a conceptual matrix that can serve as the basis for organizations to identify where they are currently positioned and map out a strategy to reach their desired positioning.

Information that we cannot share might be inferred from what do share. The intention of a user when searching for information is paramount to the successful interpretation of a query, yet such intentions are unlikely to be explicitly shared and search engines are still a long way from tapping into user intentions. In “Classifying the user intent of web queries using K-means clustering, Kathuria, Jansen, Hafernik, and Spink bring us a step closer to this elusive goal by determining if a query is informational, navigational, or transactional, through an improved clustering algorithm.

We share information that some can see, while others can touch. Reporting on an important new development for blind and visually-impaired people, Sugano, Ohta, Oda, Miura, Goto, Matsuura, Maeda, Ohshima, Matsumoto, and Takaoka, describe “eBraille: a web-based translation program for Japanese text to Braille”. Their ambitious effort has shown significant improvement over existing proprietary text to Braille translation programs. The ability to collaboratively develop a translation corpus over time and collect correction information from a wide range of distributed users shows great potential for improving the performance of complex applications such as machine translation. Projects such as this have the potential of raising accessibility to a whole new level and creating an environment in which visual impairment is no longer a barrier to the sharing of information

David G. Schwartz