Augmented Information Assimilation: Social and Algorithmic Web Aids for the Information Long Tail

Slide 1: Augmented ! information assimilation:! social and algorithmic web aids for the information long tail Brynn M. Evans Stuart K. Card UCSD PARC April 9, 2008 CHI 2008: Florence, Italy

Slide 2: information overload? 1,000,000,000 100,000,000 Global per capita content 10,000,000 1,000,000 Megabits 100,000 10,000 1,000 100 Human Long-term Memory Capacity 10 1 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 2035 2040 Year • 600 Million GB of information/year → 36 Billion GB by 2009 • 93% is digital • ~8 Billion public web pages already

Slide 3: information abundance!

Slide 4: Source: http://longtail.com

Slide 5: economics of abundance “ … 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 … Herbert Simon

Slide 6: economics of abundance 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 sources! ” that might consume it. Herbert Simon Simple way to measure attention is time spent on something.

Slide 7: Algorithmic Boost conserving attention Aggregated blog sites… RSS aggregators… Search engines… Recommendation systems! (amazon.com) Social bookmarking… Social Boost

Slide 8: How are people using these technologies to augment their everyday information assimilation?

Slide 9: The SEIC model (Nonaka & Takeuchi) Tacit knowledge becomes explicit by observing technology usage in the context of a task.

Slide 10: subject sample demographics primary systems (#users) N = 11, 3 females del.icio.us (3) Ma.gnolia (2) age range: 18-43 Simpy (1) mean age: 31 yrs Google Notebook (2) half professionals Scrapbook (1) half students Google Reader (1) MediaWiki (1)

Slide 11: recording sessions in the laboratory from the home in lab at home combined 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

Slide 12: interviews Source: Eelco Kruidenier

Slide 13: coding video Browsing Identifying item(s) to be examined more closely Reading Examining the content of an article or website Publishing an item to another source Annotating (e.g., saving, annotating, tagging, rating, starring, etc.) Sharing Sharing information directly (e.g., email, IM) Waiting for pages to load; closing browser tabs Other (“house-keeping”); starting/stopping the recording

Slide 14: coding a segment of video…

Slide 15: coding a segment of video…

Slide 16: systems System categories: Web applications: syndication feed readers algorithmic news clusterers social news systems social bookmarking systems snippet aggregators micro-blogging services wikis

Slide 17: people do more than just read sharing other browsing annotating reading correlations browsing annotating other reading -0.03 -0.71 -0.51 browsing -0.29 -0.48 annotating -0.03

Slide 18: small number of general, online tasks staying up-to-date e.g., looking at news, Flickr photos monitoring specific topics e.g., furniture on Craigslist, updates on the iPhone specific searches e.g., e-discovery, rugby, hotels refinding old information e.g., last year’s poster tips social distribution and influence e.g., sharing information with various communities

Slide 19: information diet conforms to a personal long tail PEJ user-mediated PEJ News Index Our Study systems (1)  Foreign (1) Technology (1) Technology (2)  Disasters (2) Lifestyle (2) Lifestyle (3) US Foreign Affairs (3) Business (3) Business (4) Immigration (4) Foreign (4) Government (5) Government (5) Crime (5) Foreign

Slide 20: long tail information diet

Slide 21: basic process of information assimilation

Slide 22: intention: saving for self

Slide 23: intention: self + others

Slide 24: intention: sharing with others

Slide 25: lowering system costs increases sharing intended recipient: Ma.gnolia Google Reader Ma.gnolia Media Wiki Google Notebook Google Notebook

Slide 26: 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

Slide 27: conclusions transactional costs -- information user participation ++ assimilation ++ attentional costs -- social filtering ++