Can we eliminate those zombie followers ?

If you are a user of any kind of Weibo of mainland China, it is not difficult for you to find a group of registered users which have became “influential”. (I seldom use Twitter, so I don’t know whether it is serious on that.). Everyday your Weibo account would be focused by several people with gaudy names or attractive profile photos, and you would be @ in commercial posts by some users you never known. We intuitively call these users “Zombie followers”, cause these people keep posting advertisements or doing focus on someone who needs a high rank, but they never post any energetic information about their life experience. What’s more, this kind of cheating has become a way of making profits. You can just spend little money on Taobao to buy thousands of focuses on your own Weibo in order to get a “V” authentication. Indeed, it crashes the balance of Weibo system and its ranking criterion.

a typical annoying @ on my Weibo

When Prof. Chan introduced the PageRank technology on lecture9, I was curious about whether “Zombie followers” have their power in Google engines. Later I know, the answer is definitely YES. As we know, in PageRank system, incoming and outcoming hyperlinks are important elements for computing the rank of a website. In order to gain incoming clicks or outcoming links, cheaters would post many unrelated URLs on their blogs or forums. These so called “rubbish spams” serious affected the healthy environment of the Internet.

In 2005, Two Google group leaders Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen introduced a method called “nofollow” to eliminate rubbish spams. Nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the ‘rel attribute’ of a HTML. It is an element to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. The attribute ‘REL=”NO FOLLOW”’ tells the search engine not to rank this link, but you can still visit.

How to set nofollow value

The ‘nofollow’ technology has gained great success, and then can we use something similar to fight Zombie followers in Weibo? Imagine that every user of Weibo has to set an attribute of his followers, for example, say ‘trusted follower/distrusted follower’. Then every Weibo user can have a hidden information which can only be seen by administrators. This may give Weibo operators a useful criterion to catch out Zombie follower and they can later send alert messages or directly ban these cheaters’ accounts.

Reference URLs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
http://baike.baidu.com/view/1584081.htm

Cloud computing for web games

Online Game was born with the origination of internet, its long history stems from 1970s. In the early years, online games were mostly played by real world friends in a LAN. With the development of internet and increasing speed of data rate, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Game (MMORPG) comes into people’s lives. Honestly speaking, it is not difficult for us to find the prototype of Social Networking stuffs in online games, as players in a typical MMORPG have their own identity and friend lists, some social elements like guild, auction and voice-based collaboration have already became fundamental functions of an online game.

MMORPG

While Online Games have formed a mature system, there is a new kind of online game called web game which becomes popular with SNS websites within the recent five years. Unlike traditional client-server online games, web games request no client installation on their users’ terminals, which make it more accessible for SNS websites users, and the important thing is that these web games have higher interactive level with a strong relationship to SNS functions. It is not difficult to find some apps or links of web games on most popular SNS websites like Renren.com or Weibo.com in mainland china.

a popular web game in mainland China

With the rapidly increasing number of web game players, web game companies encounter new problems on server technologies. Large number of users give a web game server heavy load, and it reduces the response speed of the server, which has a considerable negative influence on user experience. Traditionally, web game companies tend to rent temporary server from IDC suppliers, they don’t have own server as MMORPG suppliers. If they want to reduce the load pressure, more servers have to be rent and the cost is hard to balance. As a hardened online game player, I would not waste my time on a game which requires me to queue to log in at peak period, and uncomfortable delay makes me depressed when playing games.

a comic about network delay

One efficient way to solve this problem is applying cloud computing servers. Some IDC suppliers have started to offer cloud computing service for web game companies. For example, in mainland China, an IDC supplier CloudEX offers advanced IaaS cloud service called ECC (Elastic Computing Cloud) which is applied in many web games. 

All data processing is shared among several node servers spread in different provinces. The load pressure is reduced and the IT structure is easier for administration. Although cloud computing is more efficient, this technology is not universally used in mainland China. IDC suppliers spend big money on setting up node servers, and it is the web game users that pay this bill. The task to reduce the cost of cloud computing server still has a long way to go, however, it is a trend of future web games.   


Answer of questions in Note of Week 6
1.Class Activity One A
   (1)A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network.
   (2)A Social Computation Cloud; A Social Storage Cloud; A Social Collaborative Cloud; A Social Cloud for Public Science; An Enterprise Social Cloud.
   Class Activity One B
   (1)A Social Cloud is a scalable computing model in which virtualized resources contributed by users are dynamically provisioned amongst a group of friends.
   (2)Cloud computing server for web games.
   Class Activity Two
   (1)Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software and computation.
   (2)Did not reach to a conclusion.

2.What was the epistemic aims in (1) Class Activity One (individual work) and (2) Class Activity Two (group work)? Is there any change in epistemic aim? If so, why did you change your aims?

    I think the epistemic aim of Activity One is to acquire true, justified beliefs. The epistemic aim of Activity Two is to adopt minimally justified beliefs. I changed my aim in group discussion because I don't have a deep understanding of this topic, the aim of this group discussion is to find the common part shared by answers of different group members to reach a minimally justified answer.

3.Is there any differences in terms of individual and group epistemic cognition, how?
    
    The difference is that group epistemic cognition has exchange of understanding between group members which will make the result more generic.

4.How did you approach to the problem individually and in group, respectively? Is there any differences in the processes involved?

     Individually I would search for several answers on internet and then choose one which is more likely with my experience. In group we exchange our answers and form a new result through discussion.

Something about the activity on the class of week three

During the class of week three, Rosanna did an interesting sociological experiment with us. Although the result did not come out as what it expected to be, an obvious phenomenon which lies in the concept of this experiment was shown, which is called the conformist mentality.

To speak briefly, conformist mentality means that someone tends to alternate his own feeling, judgment or cognition in order to fit the majority’s choice. Experiments show that most people have conformist mentality in different situations; however, we can say conformist mentality is one kind of human nature.

“A social network is a theoretical construct useful in the social sciences to study relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, or even entire societies.” According to the characteristics of social networking, the conformist mentality of common people is something that network designers should take into consideration. Examples are already here and there. In mainland China, a website called Dianping.com is very popular among netizens and smart phones users. In this site you can find restaurants, KTVs, gyms or any kind of consumption spaces which most customers recommend, and more detailed comments can be referred to for convenience. Usually the one with large number of positive comments will attract more potential customers. This way of advertising sometimes is more useful than detailed introduction. Now it is easy to see some advertisements of apps with a title of “xxx,xxx,xxx people are using this app now” on most social network websites, which truly works no matter the statistics is real or fabricated.

Conformist mentality not always leads you to the right choice. Many sellers take advantage of this human nature to make profits dishonestly. When we buy something on an online shopping site like Amazon.com or Taobao.com, usually we will choose one with a large recently bought record. Some dishonest shop owners would employ pretended buyers to make its trade record in order to fascinate more customers. This kind of deceiver not only breaks down reputation of the website, but also ruins the fair competition environment. The customers and those newly created shops become victims at last.

This human nature has its positive and negative influence. According to my understanding, conformist mentality leads to the right choice in most times, I don’t think it is a shame to follow the majority because to be unique is always with risks. But it is better to have your own feedback, since passive conformity and dependency generates indecisiveness when someone has to make a choice independently.

Review of the first two classes _(:3」∠)_

Honestly speaking, the first week in CUHK gave me a lot of brand new impressions that someone cannot experience in mainland China. The strongest impact within are those cutting-edge technology which do not exist on my old testbooks. In this class we talk about social networking, a booming market which have already started to change our lives these years.

The first class introduced definitions about social networking and showed some characteristcs. Among those statistics, two charts of user age and age distribution impressed me most, and then dragged me into deep thought.

A simple result which can be drawn from charts one is that most (25%) of the users on these social network websites are aged 35 to 44. At least if we wider the range of age to 25 to 54, the percentage goes to 62%. And then take a detailed look at chart two. Regardless of some client oriented websites like Bebo and Xanga, people aged from 25 to 54 still take up the most in these worldwide popular websites.

These results may not shock a common citizen in a western country, but if you are a student from mainland China, you must have some kind of unbalanced feeling in your mind, just like I do. According to my experience in mainland, the Chinese version of these charts would have a big difference. I tried but cannot find a most recent survey about age distribution of Chinese netizen, however, according to a survey of 2010, Chinese netizen aged from 18 to 30 take up over 50% of the whole group. Although the number of netizen aged from 30 to 50 are increasing, the rate is still lower than western countries. Despite a Chinese netzen cannot visit Facebook, Twitter or Youtube without the help of a proxy tool, we still have our Chinese version of these world popular social networks, and the number of their users is even bigger than the original one. So the truth is, the age of core clients of Chinese social networks is around 20 to 30, much younger than the counterparts in the world.

The best examples are my parents and their generation, people aged from 40 to 60 in China. In deed, they began to experience the Internet much later than their peers in developed countries, but that does not include social networks which just become popular these years. Up to now, I find out that the most things my parents do on the Internet are glancing over news, playing card games, reading online novels and watching movies. They do not know Renren.com and never create a Weibo account, some older people even do not know how to use QQ. Although these websites mainly talks about something they may not care about, but in my point of view, such social network websites like Dianping.com and Taobao.com are able to catch their eyes. In fact, they seem unwilling to touch these new things. In their bones they tend to follow a stereotype routine. Thinking about this interesting phenomenon, I find a similarity which exists in netizen of my parents’ generation, however, they are reluctant, even feared to try new technology which will bring changes to their lives. The same case can be found in the spread of smart phones in China. People of middle age are still willing to use cellphones which only have fundamental function like calling and SMS. Someone is using a smart phone but never install apps. On the opposite, middle-aged people in western countries still curious about new development.

It is a work of someone else to look deep into such culture difference. For a engineering student like me it seems too difficult to come out with a convincing answer. But for those operators of Chinese social networks companies, digging out these tremendous potiential clients maybe a considerable method to increase profit, and I think they are already working on it.