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The emergence of popular social media allows people to generate and share information in unprecedented and multiple ways. While studies concerning social media data are plentiful and can be found across a variety of scholarly disciplines, there has been little research done that compares multiple social media while considering topics and goals of an investigation. We collected and analyzed comparable data from four different social media sources: Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and the New York Times website, across five research topics. We then analyzed these data sets across several criteria, such as richness and the diversity of information that they contain. Our analysis shows the trade-offs between different social media services and also provides a new framework to compare cross-platform data collection and analysis utility.

Searching the Web for information via search engines is a ubiquitous phenomenon and a well-established field of study in Information Science. Social media sites also continue to evolve and by now have gained enough popularity and momentum to be used as not just vessels for communication with others, but also as important repositories of information. However, it is not clear if the information behavior of users of traditional search engines differ from those performing information searches strictly on social media sites. To address this, we examined data from two user studies on people's exploratory searching behavior: one group only used Web search engines, while the other exclusively used social media sites to search for information. Information search behaviors of both groups regarding exploratory tasks were observed and analyzed through search log and surveys. The results indicate that, while people using social media sites for exploratory search tasks find a smaller quantity and a less diverse set of documents than what they might discover when utilizing traditional Web search engines, they do perceive to end up with more relevant documents. They also report doing less work and feeling less challenged.

The World Wide Web (the Web) is ubiquitous in people's lives today and is used on a daily basis to get information on a variety of topics. While information seeking behavior has been studied extensively in a Web setting, many of these studies assume a task-oriented search for information even though much of the information seeking on the Web is not necessarily done with previously stated information needs or goals. Some Web information seeking activity is done for purposes of entertainment, or for simply connecting with other people (for example, via social media websites), oftentimes with an unstructured, serendipitous approach. Information seeking in general, and information acquisition, in particular, is a pleasurable activity in and of itself. Surfing the Web for pleasure is a prominent activity and worthy of our attention as researchers. To do so, we need an appropriate framework. This paper borrows ideas from a social-cognitive approach to the uses and gratifications paradigm in order to investigate the suitability of that framework in a Web information access setting. More specifically, we use the answers from questions we asked to 180 survey respondents about their motivations for surfing the Web for pleasure and their affective states during and after their surfing sessions. The findings indicate that the social-cognitive approach to uses and gratifications is a useful baseline. We make enhancements to it and propose our own framework for research in this area. We present data to bolster the notion that the seeking and acquisition of information brings pleasure and we propose a framework to study user motivations and affective states both during and after their "surfing the Web for pleasure" sessions.