(Editorial review from Amazon.com):
"A refreshingly unconventional look at architecture and the World Wide Web. Using Vitruvius' classical text De Arquitectura as a starting point, De Kerckhove begins a journey into the exciting world of the Internet. On the one hand he explores the architecture of this revolutionary mediums, on the other, he considers the wide-ranging opportunities which the IT world offers for architectonic design, revealing how this new medium for communication is as much based on tradition as on innovation.

Derrick de Kerckhove is the Director of the McLuhan Institute and Professor at the University of Toronto. His research into the effects of innovative technology on human communication, of new media on traditional culture have gained worldwide recognition."

Architecture of Intelligence: by Derrick de Kerckhove

"We are interested in desiging systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computing networks. We begin by asking what properties of the physical world support graceful human-human communication in face-to-face situations, and argue that it is possible to design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activites visible to one another. We call such systems "socially translucent systems" and suggest that they have three characteristics -- visbility, awareness, and accountability -- which enable people to draw upon their experience and expertise to structure their interactions with one another. To motivate and focus our ideas we develop a vision of knowledge communities, conversationally based systems that support the creation, management and reuse of knowledge in a social context. We describe our experience in designing and deploying one layer of functionality for knowledge communities, embodied in a working system called "Barbie" and discuss research issues raised by a socially translucent approach to design."

Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes

This article is available on request via email. Also, follow the "similar" link for a number of good papers.

Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems

"Sufficiently frequent interaction between partners has been identified by, a.o., Axelrod as a more-or-less sufficient condition for stable cooperation. [...] In this paper, we develop a model for 'embedded trust' [...] The analysis reconfirms the standard predictions about how the level of trust depends on the payoffs and the shadow of the future. We provide new predictions both on between-network effects ("which network is more favorable for cooperation?") and on within-network effects ("in which network position can you trust more?")."

Cooperation via social networks

"Conventional techniques for finding information on the web are time-consuming and often yield unreliable results. This has led to renewed interest in referral systems, which support the interactions of people with others by directing users toward others who might have the answers they seek. We consider a social network of agents who assist each other in helping their users find information. Unlike in most previous approaches, our architecture is fully distributed and includes agents who preserve the privacy and autonomy of their users. These agents learn models of each other in terms of expertise (ability to produce correct domain answers), and sociability [...]"

The MARS Adaptive Social Network for Information Access: Architecture and Experimental Results (ResearchIndex)

"Trust is important wherever agents must interact. We consider the important case of interactions in electronic communities, where the agents assist and represent principal entities, such as people and businesses. We propose a social mechanism of reputation management, which aims at avoiding interaction with undesirable participants. [...]

A Social Mechanism of Reputation Management in Electronic Communities