Mobile Mediated Information Spaces
The success of the web mainly lends its thanks to the openness of its technologies. Early Internet portals provided the only simple means to find and access websites to the average user. These websites were selected and hand-picked by human editors. This model of content organisation failed when the rate of growth of Internet usage increased faster than the editors could manage. The Internet became a phenomenally diverse “place”, and consumers wanted easier access to information that any one taxonomy expert would not know about. Search engines like Altavista and Yahoo! played their parts in solving this problem, and we should be thankful to them; because without these search companies existing, there wouldn’t be the Google of today, which has set the benchmark for keyword searching of the modern Internet.
Now, we have Web 2.0 and sites like digg.com and flickr.com demonstrating a new information organisation paradigm. Here, the role of the editor shifts to the users themselves, and the information space becomes a constantly changing landscape in a World where every average Joe and Dave are gods.
The amount of mobile content people create is surely going to increase, as the capturing technology and data networks improve, making it more convenient to use our phones than dedicated devices. Before even thinking about how we are going to effectively organise this information we have to understand that mobile media is inherently different - we are now dealing with content with a context. Simply put, mobile content has an associated place, time and situation. As such, attaching contextual metadata to mobile media is important, but how we do this is not difficult if kept simple. Detecting time is trivial, but detecting place is slightly more difficult, but solved with current technology. Social context can to an extent be inferred using proximity based communication technologies which can detect known people within a certain radius.
The main question that is interesting to me is this: how do we visualise, search and browse this information space on mobile devices? So much research time has been spent trying to figure out the best semantics to use for the labeling of information aiming towards the envision of the semantic web, how to analyse socio-dynamical problems, struggling to predict locations using geo-temporal patterns and so on, but work on how humans should interact with this vast data space has been lacking.
Keep watching this space for further thoughts (I deliberately kept this post simple)…
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