Towards Understanding How Personality, Motivation, and Events Trigger Web User Activity

Web 2.0 provided internet users with a dynamic medium, where information is updated continuously and anyone can participate. Though preliminary analysis exists, there is still little understanding on what exactly stimulates users to actively participate, create and share content in online communities. In this paper we present a methodology that aspires to identify and analyze those events that trigger web user activity, content creation and sharing in Web 2.0. Our approach is based on user personality and motivation, and on the occurrence of events with a personal or global impact. The proposed methodology was applied on data collected from Flickr and analysis was performed through the use of statistics and data mining techniques.