Increasingly, multimedia collections are associated with networked communities consisting of interconnected groups of users who create, annotate, browse, search, share, view, critique and remix collection content. Information arises within networked communities via connections among users and in the course of interactions between users and content. Community-derived information can be exploited to improve user access to multimedia. This paper provides a survey of techniques that make use of a combination of three information sources: community-contributed information (e.g., tags and ratings), network structure and techniques for multimedia content analysis. This  triple synergy  offers a wide range of opportunities for improving access to multimedia in networked communities. We focus our survey on three areas important for multimedia access: annotation, distribution and retrieval. The picture that emerges is promising: information derived from the social community is remarkably effective in improving access to multimedia content, and participation in networked communities has a high payoff.
['Naeem Ramzan', 'Martha Larson', 'Frederic Dufaux', 'Kai Clüver']
The participation payoff: challenges and opportunities for multimedia access in networked communities