Abstract

Links between web sites can be seen as evidence of a type of emergent collaboration among web site authors. We report here on an empirical investigation into emergent collaboration. We developed a webcrawling algorithm and tested its performance on topics volunteered by 30 subjects. Our findings include: . Some topics exhibit emergent collaboration, some do not. The presence of commercial sites reduces collaboration. . When sites are linked with other sites, they tend to group into one large, tightly connected component. . Connectivity can serve as the basis for collaborative filtering. Human experts rate connected sites as significantly more relevant and of higher quality. Keywords Social filtering, collaborative filtering, computer supported cooperative work, human computer interaction, information access, information retrieval INTRODUCTION The field of CSCW sees collaboration as involving people who know they are working together, e.g., to edit a document, to carry out a soft...

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