Social Information Processing:

The label “social media” has been attached to a quickly growing number of web sites, such as blogs, wikis, Flickr, and Del.icio.us, whose content is primarily user-driven. In the process of using social media sites, users are generating content and adding metadata in the form of (1) tags: content annotations using freely-chosen keywords; (2) ratings: passive or active evaluation of content; and (3) social networks: where users designate others as friends so as to track their activities. The connections between content, users and metadata create layers of rich interlinked data that is revolutionizing information processing by facilitating new methods of interacting with information. We call this "social information processing." Social information processing allows users to collaborate implicitly (or explicitly) by leveraging the opinions and knowledge of others to solve problems such as information management, discovery, and personalization. In addition to improving individual user experience, social information processing may lead to new solutions to collective problems, such as ensuring fairness, managing common resources, etc. Another exciting possibility is that wholly new kinds of knowledge will emerge from the distributed activities of many users.