Introduction

摘要

In the last few years, we have witnessed a gradual shift from largely static, read-only web to quickly expanding user-generated web. There has been an exponential growth in the availability and use of online platforms where users can post their own content. A major part of these platforms include social media websites and apps, blogs, Q&A forums and several similar platforms. All of these are almost exclusively user-generated websites. In all of these platforms and forums, humongous amount of data is created and circulated every minute. It has been estimated that there has been an increase of approximately 25% in the number of tweets per minutes and 22% increase in the number of Facebook posts per minute in the last 3 years. It is posited that approximately 500 million tweets are sent per day, 4.3 billion Facebook messages are posted and more than 200 million emails are sent each day, and approximately 2 million new blog posts are created daily over the web. There is no such thing as a 'consolidated figure' of the number of comments and opinion generated on websites worldwide, but it can be safely assumed that such a figure would be staggering.