Post on 01-Feb-2016
description
Augmented information assimilation:
social and algorithmic web aids for the information long tail
Brynn M. Evans Stuart K. Card UCSD PARC
April 9, 2008CHI 2008: Florence, Italy
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2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 2035 2040
Year
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Global per capita content
Human Long-term Memory Capacity
• 600 Million GB of information/year → 36 Billion GB by 2009• 93% is digital• ~8 Billion public web pages already
information overload?
information abundance!
Source: http://longtail.com
economics of abundance
Herbert Simon
“… A rabbit-rich world is a lettuce-poor world, and vice versa.
The obverse of a population problem is a scarcity problem, hence a resource-allocation problem. There is only so much lettuce to go around, and it will have to be allocated somehow among the rabbits …
economics of abundance
Herbert Simon
Similarly, in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.
What information consumes is rather obvious; it consumes the attention of its recipients.
Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate efficiently among the overabundance of information sourcesthat might consume it.”
Simple way to measure attention is time spent on something.
conserving attentionA
lgori
thm
ic
Boost
Social Boost
Search engines…
Social bookmarking…
Aggregated blog sites…
RSS aggregators…
Recommendation systems (amazon.com)
How are people using these technologies to augment their
everyday information assimilation?
The SEIC model (Nonaka & Takeuchi)
Tacit knowledge becomes explicit by observing technology usage in the context of a task.
subject sample
N = 11, 3 females
age range: 18-43mean age: 31 yrs
half professionalshalf students
demographics primary systems (#users)
del.icio.us (3)Ma.gnolia (2)Simpy (1)
Google Notebook (2) Scrapbook (1)
Google Reader (1)
MediaWiki (1)
recording sessions
in the laboratory from the home
in lab at homecombined
Total: mins (hrs)
185.5 (3.1) 421.7 (46.9)607.2 (10.1)
mean 23.2 mins 46.9 mins 55.2 mins
interviews
Source: Eelco Kruidenier
coding video
Browsing Identifying item(s) to be examined more closely
Reading Examining the content of an article or website
Annotating
Publishing an item to another source (e.g., saving, annotating, tagging, rating, starring, etc.)
Sharing Sharing information directly (e.g., email, IM)
Other Waiting for pages to load; closing browser tabs (“house-keeping”); starting/stopping the recording
coding a segment of video…
coding a segment of video…
System categories: Web applications:
syndication feed readers
algorithmic news clusterers
social news systems
social bookmarking systems
snippet aggregators
micro-blogging services
wikis
systems
correlations
sharing
browsing
reading
annotating
other
browsing annotating
other
reading -0.03 -0.71 -0.51browsing -0.29 -0.48annotating
-0.03
people do more than just read
small number of general, online tasks
staying up-to-date
monitoring specific topics
specific searches
refinding old information
social distribution and influence
e.g., looking at news, Flickr photos
e.g., furniture on Craigslist, updates on the iPhone
e.g., e-discovery, rugby, hotels
e.g., last year’s poster tips
e.g., sharing information with various communities
information diet conforms to a personal long tail
PEJ News IndexPEJ user-mediated systems
Our Study
(1)Foreign(2)Disasters(3) US Foreign
Affairs(4) Immigration(5) Government
(1) Technology(2) Lifestyle(3) Business(4) Foreign(5) Crime
(1) Technology
(2) Lifestyle(3) Business(4)
Government
(5) Foreign
long tail information diet
basic process of information assimilation
intention: saving for self
intention: self + others
intention: sharing with others
lowering system costs increases sharing
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cost (seconds per act)
freq
uenc
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g m
inut
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others
self
Ma.gnolia
Ma.gnolia
Google Reader
Media Wiki Google Notebook
Google Notebook
intended recipient:
conclusions
Information assimilation is more than foraging,
also organizing and sharing
People use social and algorithmic tools
to reduce attention to take advantage
of information abundance
conclusions
transactional costs --
user participation ++
social filtering ++attentional costs --
information assimilation ++