Properties of Social Media
Scale: the number of users/number of people the information can reach
Immediacy: how quickly information is disseminated
Heterogeneity: users/people of diverse backgrounds
Duplication: information is repeated or copied
Semi-structuredness: informal/low quality information connected using metadata
Small-worldness: six-degrees of separation
Scale Free Property: degree distribution that asymptotically follows a power law
Network Evolution: changed over time by adding or removing
The Future of Information Retrieval in Social Media
There are some challenges with trying to organize information in social media so it can be found again later. The assignment of metadata is usually left up to the users, but not every user would use the same metadata to describe the information. There is not much of a standard that is used to regulate metadata besides the users' discretion. This means it is more difficult to retrieve information because not all of it has proper metadata. Certain metadata is used because enough users use it that it becomes popular. This helps mitigate the problem, but a solution is yet to be found.