The search and social media workshop at SIGIR 2009

Abstract

Social applications are the fastest growing segment of the web. They establish new forums for content creation, allow people to connect to each other and share information, and permit novel applications at the intersection of people and information. However, to date, social media has been primarily popular for connecting people, not for finding information. While there has been progress on searching particular kinds of social media, such as blogs, search in others (e.g., Facebook, Myspace, of flickr) are not as well understood. To address these questions, the second workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2009) was held at SIGIR 2009 in Boston, MA in July 2009. The main workshop website is available at http://ir.mathcs.emory.edu/SSM2009/. SSM 2009 followed on the highly successful SSM 2008 workshop held at CIKM 2008 in Napa, CA. As in the previous year, the workshop had nearly 50 attendees from academia and industry. The purpose of this workshop was to bring together information retrieval and social media researchers to consider the following questions: How should we search in social media? What are the needs of users, and models of those needs, specific to social media search? What models make the most sense? How does search interact with existing uses of social media? How can social media search complement traditional web search? What new search paradigms for information finding can be facilitated by social media?