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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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)

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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 ++