Social plugins for sharing news through Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly salient features on news sites. Together with the user comment feature, social plugins are the most common way for users to contribute. The wide use of multiple features has opened new areas to comprehensively study users' participatory practices. However, how do these opportunities to participate vary between the participatory spaces that news sites affiliated with local, national broadsheet and tabloid news constitute? How are these opportunities appropriated by users in terms of participatory practices such as commenting and sharing news through Facebook and Twitter? In addition, what differences are there between news sites in these respects? To answer these questions, a quantitative content analysis has been conducted on 3,444 articles from nine Swedish online newspapers. Local newspapers are more likely to allow users to comment on articles than are national newspapers. Tweeting news is appropriated only on news sites affiliated with evening tabloids and national morning newspapers. Sharing news through Facebook is 20 times more common than tweeting news or commenting. The majority of news items do not attract any user interaction.

The dissemination of electric vehicles (EVs) is an important step towards a more sustainable transport system, but barriers to adoption persist. Much effort and resources are put into solving battery technology related issues and progress is made continuously. There remain however important matters that have not been equally discussed; the design of user interfaces and human-machine interaction (HMI) of EVs is one. This paper seeks to examine a few of the issues regarding EV HMI through a study that evaluates two different concepts for an EV instrument cluster in order to develop knowledge on (i) what information is relevant to present to the driver of an EV and (ii) how that information should be presented; innovatively or in a more familiar way. Two consecutive user tests, according to a between-subject procedure, were used to test two concepts in a driving simulator. Ten participants, with little or no experience of driving an electric or a hybrid electric vehicle, tested each concept. The participants were asked to drive the EV simulator and to interact with the user interface while different events were triggered, designed so that the participants would experience several of the situations that might appear when driving an EV for a longer period of time. Data was gathered through objective measurements, e.g. time, number if errors etc., as well as through questionnaires and interviewsThe results show that participants had problems understanding the EV specific information content independent of concepts, even though they considered the information shown to be the right one. Both concepts had advantages and disadvantages, most notably that participants expected the vehicle to work like a conventional car when the interface was traditional and that they felt insecure when the interface was innovative.Some of the discovered problems can be attributed to the participants' lack of knowledge and useful mental concepts regarding electricity and batteries, which made understanding the information difficult. More research on how to support EV drivers through design of the HMI given these deficiencies is needed.

The development of social media applications, such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, has offered new participatory opportunities for everyday media users. This article contributes to research by looking into one specific aspect of the increasingly more participatory media ecology—the news comment feature. Drawing on a quantitative content analysis of 1,100 news pieces, as well as spaces for user comments, the article reveals both how this emerging public space is shaped by the media company and, later, appropriated by their participating users. Our analysis reveals, for instance, that the online newspaper prefers to allow users to comment on lightweight news such as sports and entertainment. The users, however, prefer to post comments on news covering changes in proximity space, politics, and health care, while also clearly ignoring the most available news pieces (sport and entertainment). In the concluding section, the discrepancy in preferences is discussed.

This study investigates the types of information that users of a local news site share on Facebook. This issue relates to the idea of "churnalism", which concerns a form of weakened journalism that diminishes the ability to perform expected tasks in a democratic society. As a major social media platform, Facebook has acquired substantial influence over news dissemination, and therefore, scholarly focus needs to be directed to users as news disseminators. The manners by which users share news on Facebook indicate whether churnalism is promoted or abated through users' interaction with online news. In this study, a quantitative content analysis illustrates how 348 news articles published on a local news site were shared 7,266 times. The results show that concerns related to churnalism should be directed primarily to the fact that the news outlet only rarely provides users with opportunities to interact with serious or hard news, while lightweight news is frequently offered. Despite this, users abate churnalism in the sense that the news they prefer to share is news from in-house sources rather than from external sources. The news extensively shared covers changes in the vicinity, and health care, and has emerged from local and regional events.

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