Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2009)
23 July 2009 in Boston, MA
Co-located with SIGIR 2009
http://ir.mathcs.emory.edu/SSM2009/

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.

The purpose of this workshop is 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?

Search in Social Media 2009 follows up on the highly successful SSM
2008 workshop held at CIKM 2008 in Napa, CA. Nearly 50 attendees from
academia and industry gathered for an informative and interactive day
of talks, panels, and discussion. We are looking forward to an
equally exciting workshop at SIGIR 2009 in Boston!

We solicit submissions on topics at the intersection of information
finding and social media, including, but not limited to:

* Searching blogs, tweets, and other textual social media.
* Searching within social networks, including expert finding.
* Searching Wikipedia discussions and revision histories.
* Searching online discussions, mailing lists, forums, and community
question answering sites.
* The role of human-powered and community question answering.
* Novel models of information finding and new search applications for
social media.
* The role of timeliness, authority, and accuracy in social media
search.
* Interaction between traditional web search and social media search.
* User needs assessments and task analysis for social media search.
* Usability studies of people using social media search tools.
* Interactions between searching and browsing in social media.
* Searching and exploiting folksonomies, tags, and tagged data.
* Spam and adversarial interactions in social media

Ideal papers may include late-breaking and novel research results,
position and vision papers discussing the role of search in social
media, and demonstrations of prototypes or working systems. The
workshop notes will not be formally published but will be distributed
at the workshop, and will be archived at the workshop website and/or
Arxiv.

All submissions (research papers, position papers, and demo proposals)
are limited to a maximum of 4 pages. Submissions must be in PDF
format and follow the ACM Conference style guidelines
(http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). The URL
for submissions is http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ssm2009

Important Dates

* June 16: submissions due
* June 29: notification of acceptance
* July 9: final papers due
* July 23: Workshop (full day)

Organizers

* Eugene Agichtein, Emory University
* Marti Hearst, University of California, Berkeley
* Ian Soboroff, NIST

Program Committee

Eytan Adar, University of Washington
Ed Chi, Xerox PARC
Abdur Chowdhury, Twitter
Natalie Glance, Google
Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs
Matthew Hurst, Microsoft Live Labs
Pranam Kolari, Yahoo! Labs
Craig Macdonald, University of Glasgow
Gilad Mishne, Yahoo! Labs
Doug Oard, University of Maryland
Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow
Nitya Narasimhan, Motorola Labs
Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam
Markus Strohmaier, TU Graz
Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo!