Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Clouds for Social Computing

The articles in this special issue focus on the use of cloud computing for social computing applications. Currently, two complimentary Internet based research areas are emerging: social computing and cloud computing. On the one hand, social computing empowers individual users with relatively low technological sophistication to use the web to engage in social interactions, contribute their expertise and share their content, experiences and opinions. On the other hand, cloud computing offers everyone sophisticated computing infrastructures and resources as utilities, so that individual users with relatively low computing knowledge can have at their disposal a high performing computing infrastructure with little investment. Together, these two complementary technological advances form the backbone of our digitized world, when coupled with the rise of sensors,mobile devices and the internet of things. Of course, they also face significant challenges. These articles look at each area and describe how they complement each other. The Social Web has become an important means of communication for everyone: individuals, organizations, and governments all use it to disseminate and share information, offer opinions and engage in discussions.