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Evolution of online social networks is driven by the need of their members to share and consume content, resulting in a complex interplay between individual activity and attention received from others. In a context of increasing information overload and limited resources, discovering which are the most successful behavioral patterns to attract attention is very important. To shed light on the matter, we look into the patterns of activity and popularity of users in the Yahoo Meme microblogging service. We observe that a combination of different type of social and content-producing activity is necessary to attract attention and the efficiency of users, namely the average attention received per piece of content published, for many users has a defined trend in its temporal footprint. The analysis of the user time series of efficiency shows different classes of users whose different activity patterns give insights on the type of behavior that pays off best in terms of attention gathering. In particular, sharing content with high spreading potential and then supporting the attention raised by it with social activity emerges as a frequent pattern for users gaining efficiency over time.

Mapping the functional use of city areas (e.g., mapping clusters of hotels or of electronic shops) enables a variety of applications (e.g., innovative way-finding tools). To do that mapping, researchers have recently processed geo-referenced data with spatial clustering algorithms. These algorithms usually perform two consecutive steps: they cluster nearby points on the map, and then assign labels (e.g., 'electronics') to the resulting clusters. When applied in the city context, these algorithms do not fully work, not least because they consider the two steps of clustering and labeling as separate. Since there is no reason to keep those two steps separate, we propose a framework that clusters points based not only on their density but also on their semantic relatedness. We evaluate this framework upon Foursquare data in the cities of Barcelona, Milan, and London. We find that it is more effective than the baseline method of DBSCAN in discovering functional areas. We complement that quantitative evaluation with a user study involving 111 participants in the three cities. Finally, to illustrate the generalizability of our framework, we process temporal data with it and successfully discover seasonal uses of the city.