Website Authors Research Articles

The perceived credibility of personal Web page information as influenced by the sex of the source

This field experiment examined the effects of the sex of Web site authors and Web site visitors on perceptions of the credibility of personal Web pages. Participants viewed male and female Web pages created for this study, patterned after personal pages on the Web, and assessed sponsor, message, and Web site credibility. Results revealed that men rated both message credibility and site credibility significantly higher than did women and that there was a significant interaction effect whereby opposite-sex credibility evaluations were higher than same-sex credibility evaluations. Overall, this study reveals that sex differences are meaningful in cyberspace but that the reduced cues environment challenges researchers to locate precisely what factors underlie these differences. Potential explanations include the vestiges of a sex-imbalanced Internet culture, sex similarity, sex and message congruence, and social desirability.

Online cancer patient education: evaluating usability and content.

Two patient education CD-ROMs were converted to a web-based environment. This article reports on users' evaluations of the programs' usability and content. DESCRIPTION OF EVALUATION: Subscribers to a center's web newsletter were asked to view one of two web programs and to complete a survey. The first 150 respondents were offered a free patient education CD-ROM of their choice, but users continued to respond to the survey even after a notice stated that 150 responses were received. A total of 301 surveys were completed (Colorectal Cancer Program 168; Chemotherapy Program 133). Sixty-eight percent of Colorectal Cancer Program respondents and 50% of Chemotherapy Program respondents considered the program to be more useful or much more useful than any other source of information on the topic. A majority of users for both programs preferred to view the information on the Internet rather than on CD-ROM. Many users reported trouble accessing certain segments of the media. Common complaints included the inability to open video or audio clips and the length of time needed for each page to load, despite a high-speed Internet connection. Internet use is high, with 60% of US households reporting having used the Internet to search for health information. However, little is known about user satisfaction with specific sites and what about them users like or do not like. It is hoped that these and other user evaluations will help web site authors and developers improve their sites.

An ethical evaluation of web site linking

As the World Wide Web has grown in popularity, the propriety of linking to other web sites has achieved some prominence as an important moral and legal issue. Hyperlinks represent the essence of Web-based activity, since they facilitate navigation in a unique and efficient fashion. But the pervasive activity of linking has generated notable controversies. While most sites welcome and support incoming links, others block them or seek to license them in some way. Particularly problematic are so-called 'deep links,' which bypass the home page along with the extensive advertising and promotional material that is usually found there. While some contend that a site's mere presence on the web is implicit permission for virtually any form of linking, others argue that at least in some circumstances deep linking is unfair and constitutes misappropriation of intellectual property.In this paper we will explore the issue of deep linking from a distinctly moral vantage point. While legal scholars have vigorously debated this issue, it has received little attention from moralists. But deep linking raises a plethora of complex property issues with subtle moral implications, and hence it deserves our careful scrutiny. The most fundamental question concerns the appropriate scope of property rights for a web site and how those rights can be properly balanced against the common good of free and open communications on the Web. It is our contention that there is no presumptive claim to the liberty of deep linking at will, since it may be disrespectful of property rights in certain situations. In order to defend this position we first make the case that a web site is a form of intellectual property, drawing support from the major theories that justify property ownership. Once we have established that a web site is really property, we consider the specific rights implied by such ownership. We conclude that on the basis of those rights, a prima facie case can be made that because of the potential for negative effects, users should not presume that deep linking is acceptable unless they first seek out the permission of the target web site.We also fully appreciate the dangers inherent in propertizing the web and the need to encourage the most flexible forms of linking. Therefore, we argue that any arbitrary or unnecessary restrictions against deep linking should be eschewed for the sake of the common good of open communications, flexibility, and maximum porosity in the Internet environment. While web site authors may indeed have a property right in their creative work they have a correlative obligation to promote the sharing and free flow of information when their specific ownership rights are not put in jeopardy by deep linking.

Winner of LIBRI Best Student Paper Award 1999 The First Monday Metadata Project

Publicly available web pages number over 100 million and this number will continue to grow in the foreseeable future. This fact serves to aggravate the increasing difficulty of finding information on the Internet. The application of metatags in the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) header of a web page is one method employed by web site developers and authors to help users locate information on the site. Through the use of a search engine, the user can then locate more relevant matches because metatags relating to the site's contents are used to index and describe the site. A metadata policy for First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal on the Internet, was developed and implemented, with the goal of increasing the ranking of a selected group of articles in some search engines. In the article, metadata and metatags are defined, and an introduction to the Dublin Core Initiative is given. The philosophy and structure of First Monday's metadata is discussed, including syntax-specific examples. The practical application viewpoint taken in this project also necessitated an examination of Internet search engines currently indexing on metatags. The paper concludes with preliminary research conclusions on the utility of the tags to articles in First Monday.