In the last few years, a new type of synchronous social networking services (SNSs) has emerged-social live streaming services (SLSSs). Studying SLSSs is a new and exciting research field in information science. What information behaviors do users of live streaming platforms exhibit? In our empirical study we analyzed information production behavior (i.e., broadcasting) as well as information reception behavior (watching streams and commenting on them). We conducted two quantitative investigations, namely an online survey with YouNow users (N = 123) and observations of live streams on YouNow (N = 434). YouNow is a service with video streams mostly made by adolescents for adolescents. YouNow users like to watch streams, to chat while watching, and to reward performers by using emoticons. While broadcasting, there is no anonymity (as in nearly all other WWW services). Synchronous SNSs remind us of the film The Truman Show, as anyone has the chance to consciously broadcast his or her own life real-time.

Cities From the Perspective of Information ScienceCity and regional research and information science: What do these areas of research have in common? Nothing, at first sight; neither were we able to find any literature concerning the intersection of both disciplines. With the advent of the knowledge society, however, a new type of city is

Concept. A concept is determined via its intension and extension as well as by definition. We will meet the problem of vagueness by introducing prototypes. Some important definitions are concept explanations (after Aristotle) and the definition of family resemblances (in the sense of Wittgenstein). We will model concepts as frames (according to Barsalou). The most important paradigmatic relation in KOS is hierarchy, which must be arranged into different classes: Hyponymy consists of taxonomy and simple hyponymy, meronymy consists of many different part-whole-relations. For practical application purposes, the transitivity of the given relation is very important. Unspecific associative relations are of little help to our focused applications and should be replaced by generalizable and domain-specific relations. We will discuss the reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity of paradigmatic relations as well as the appearance of specific semantic relations in the different kinds of KOS (folksonomies, nomenclatures, classification systems, thesauri, and ontologies). Finally, we will pick out KOS as a central theme of the Semantic Web.

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