Recession RECOVERY is here!!!

French & German GDP figures for the second quarter show it clearly - black on white, finally the economic growth substantiated. Technically this means Germany and France are out of the recession, yuppiii, yep yey, you might think.

This is not quite the case thought. It seems most of the growth was spawned by govermental rescue packages and incentives that initiated good levels of consumer spending (i.e. old car exchange incentives). Export levels in germany have indeed increased, however imports have fallen which in fact inflates the GDP figure with a certain uncertainty.

Let us hope the largest shrinking of worldwide economies is over soon, but maybe getting too excited too quickly will be a mistake.

Web 2.0 and Mass Collaboration

Hey folks, its been a while since my last post! Today I would like to talk about web 2.0, it is a hype word most of you would have heared in the recent years, either used by your friends or somewhere in the media.

Web 2.0 is not a new version of the internet, it is rather a different paradigm, it basically stands for a web that is editable by everyone. In the past, a website administrator would be responsible for updating and editing a websites online content. However now it has become much more common for everyone to update online content, applications such as wikipedia, youtube, flickr or facebook are great examples of web 2.0 systems. 

The problem we are currently facing is to gain a better understanding of how this affects user behaviour on the internet, and for me especially, it is interesting to investigate ways in which content that resulted from a form of mass collaboration (that is; all users updating content with a certain goal in mind, this could be to inform, compete, or simply share) can be used to an advantage. In this regard, we just recently had a publication on the use of web 2.0 system youtube in financial news publication (http://www.ieee-sofa2009.org/). We found some interesting results and another two papers have recently been published on work stemming from this investigation.

To finish on an entertaining note, a recent study looked at facebook use and relationship jealousy. Seems like worth a read for all you out there with girlfriends/boyfriends and partners.