Cicro

an interactive visual interface for crowd communication online

Masao Ohira

Hitoshi Masaki

Ken-Ichi Matsumoto

pp. 251-260

in: A. Ant Ozok, Panayiotis Zaphiris (eds), Online communities and social computing, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

As a means for online communication has become sophisticated and diverse (e.g. twitter, SNSs, YouTube, and etc.), a large indefinite number of users actively communicate each other in online communities. Thorough such the communications, they sometimes form the "crowd mind" which is temporally shared values and beliefs among mass users and can affect our society either positively or negatively. In this paper we present a concept of the online crowd and introduce CICRO, an interactive visual interface for the crowd communication. As a result of our experiment, we found that CICRO encouraged 1.7 times more active discussions among users than that of BBS since it provides users with an easy way to understand the existence of a variety of others' opinions and/or impressions in the discussions.