Information Fragments for a Pervasive World

Russell BealeAdvanced Interaction Group

School of Computer ScienceUniversity of BirminghamEdgbaston, Birmingham,

B15 2TT UKR.Beale@cs.bham.ac.uk

ABSTRACTIs the second paragraph dead? Technology and users are tending tocreate and consume information in ever decreasing chunks, forcingcontent creators to create shorter fragments of text and other media.This paper examines this phenomenon, and provides examples ofwhere and why this is happening. It examines the role of metadata,and how this can be used to provide effective, personalizedcommunication in a fragmented digital world.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsH5.0 Information interfaces and presentation; H.3.5. Onlineinformation systems.

General TermsDesign, Documentation, Human Factors

KeywordsInformation design, fragmentation, metadata, personalcommunication, blogs, web sites, email, learning objects,pervasive space

1. INTRODUCTIONIn this paper we take a look at an emerging trend in informationpresentation which appears to be a drift towards ever shortercontent.

Providing information to people in a clear manner has alwaysbeen important, but there are now multiple ways in which peoplecan access information. The conventional routes of television,magazines, and radio are still present, but they have beensupplemented by the internet and now much more mobile accessto information, through devices such as mobile phones,smartphones and the PDA. It is also clear that many users areaccessing information for a far wider variety of purposes thanthey ever used to: these range from supporting their knowledge,

though to informal and formal learning, as well as accessingnews, views and opinions, from both conventional media outletsas well as more individualistic sources. It is also clear that thereare many more providers of information nowadays than there everused to be. Most consumers of information also create it, whetherfor public consumption (e.g. blogs) or for restricted publication(e.g. email, instant messaging, text messaging). These differentroutes for accessing information, and the different technologiesused to provide access, are themselves shaping the form of theinformation that can be accessed, tending to favour short contentover longer material. This paper discusses these trends.

2. BLOGSIf the internet gave the ordinary person a chance to publish theiropinions, then things like blogs have swollen those individualcries into a chorus, and sometimes into significant symphoniesthat have political or social effects. Blogs are a rapidly growingphenomena [1]. Blogs are chronologically-ordered postings,usually from individuals, and offer a personal glimpse of thesubjects of interest to that person [2]. They provide anidiosyncratic perspective on topics, but their power is that theycan be easily combined, read in tandem with others of similardisposition, or differing views and can create the appearance of agroundswell of opinion and views [3]. Bloggers often createcommunities of people who share similar views, and commentsand concepts get passed around that community rapidly andeffectively [4].

One of the key elements of blogs is that they tend to be writtenrelatively frequently, and with their format of commenting onthings either in the internet, the wider world, or just the orbit ofthat individual, they encourage a focus on single issues at a time,creating a series of short, bite-sized postings. And since manyblogs are read in odd fragments of time, between other tasks,those that offer concise chunks of digestible information are morelikely to find a wider readership than those that produce longtexts. One of the motivations for continuing to blog is to entertainthe readership that you have initially found, and so, since peoplewant to be read, they tend to drift into the shorter forms ofcommentaries that are so well supported by the blogging format.

It is not only the users that have generated a shift towards briefcontent: the inherent nature of the blogging software commonlyavailable (e.g. www.blogger.com, www.livejournal.com) offer asmallish text box in the middle of a web screen, which, whilst itwill allow arbitrarily long text entry, tends to suggest that a

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smaller textual piece is sufficient. No complex editing tools areavailable, and there is no easy way of navigating through adocument of any length in the editor – it is simpler to create asmaller piece than a longer one. And this is quite deliberate:blogs are designed to allow non-technical people to publish to theWeb with no prior knowledge of the technologies involved –indeed, Blogger’s tagline is “Push-Button Publishing for thepeople”. It is this focus on simplicity and ease of access that hasencouraged the massive take-up of blogging.

3. NEWS SITES

It is not only blogs that have encouraged shorter content. From amore classic information provider perspective, we can see thesame phenomena occurring.

In website design for news sources, whether newspapers ororganizations such as the BBC or CNN, the default design patternfor the website is a multiple column design, with numerous newsstories highlighted in different places. Consider, as an example,the CNN site shown in Figure 1 and the BBC site shown in Figure2. Whilst styled differently, and with a different focus for thenews stories, they both show short summaries of news stories inthe multicolumn format. This is designed to be both familiar toreaders of conventional newspapers, and to draw the reader in tothe site: by offering quick snippets of information there is littleoverhead in scanning each of them, so the cognitive requirementsat the point of entry are low. And by offering numerous differentstories it is likely that the individual interests of the user may bepiqued sufficiently that they will stay longer and browse certainareas in more detail.

Figure 1: CNN news site

But this also has the effect of reducing many of the news storiesand pieces of information seen by the user to one line, or a few at

most. It provides ‘text bites’ – the visual equivalent of soundbites, those brief, pithy comments so beloved of politicians sinceit gets them into the media.

If we scratch beneath the surface of these sites, there is still anissue. Pages dedicated to a single story are often just that – singlescreens of information, often with all content visible withoutscrolling. Clearly, your scroll point depends on your screen andhow your systems are configured, but all the key elements of astory are contained above the fold (the point on the web pagebelow which users would have to scroll to see). In some senses,this is not particularly surprising, and for journalists is not thatdifficult to accommodate. Even in printed media, the firstparagraph of a news item typically encapsulates the mainelements, and the story is revealed layer on layer through thearticle, such that readers can stop at pretty much any paragraphand still take away the full gist of the story. Even in print, youcannot guarantee your reader’s interest to the end.

We can also consider that many people are now accessing websites via RSS – Really Simple Syndication – which providestextual summaries of content and a link to the original. Again,this means that many people are seeing only a title and a fewlines of detail, rather than significant content.

Figure 2: BBC news site

4. MOBILE DEVICES

4.1 Personal digital assistantsWhen we consider that the sales of network enabled PersonalDigital Assistants (PDAs) have grown hugely whilst desktopgrowth is almost static, it is clear than many people are choosingto access their news and information sources on a PDAAccording to data from IT analyst firm Gartner, "worldwide PDA

shipments increased 25% to 3.4 million," for "the best first quarterever for PDA sales." ("PDA Market Has Record First Quarter,Growing 25 Percent," May 2, 2005.)

"PDAs with integrated wireless LAN or cellular capabilitiesaccounted for about 55% of all PDAs shipped in Q1-05," and adds"this increase is primarily the result of the growing popularity ofwireless e-mail, with users favoring larger displays and QWERTYkeyboards that are operated with both hands."

It is clear that the amount of space available on a PDA screen ismuch more limited than that in a conventional web browser, andso the content provided is often reduced in size in order to make itfit the screen. This is important from a usability point of view –PDAs are small, and navigating around a standard sized web pageis not an easy task. The BBC News site for mobile browsers suichas PDAs is shown in Figure 3. Numerous approaches have beenproposed to aid the display of web content on PDAs, ofteninvolving intelligent browsers [5] or revised rendering schemes toprovide overviews and then detail where necessary [6], but theapproach taken by those major services that can afford it is toprovide tailored content for the particular device.

Figure 3: PDA formatted news page

4.2 Smart and mobile phonesWhen we consider smartphones and mobile phones with WMLbrowsers, the situation is even more constrained, and it is clearthat the technology drives a reformatting of the content. One of

the reasons for WMLs reduced take-up is that it proved too costlywith insufficient return for organizations to rewrite their contentfor WML-only browsers. The rise and rise of SMS has seen theuse of short content increase, however: weather forecasts, newsstories and horoscopes are all now compressed into 160 charactersor less, and increasing numbers of providers are offering textservices in which critical information is presented in snippet form.SMS was originally designed for engineers to test aspects of themobile network, and was not intended for public access – but thistechnology has been so successfully subverted that it plays amajor role in the marketing techniques and tariffs of all the majorplayers. Users have developed a shorthand approach to textingfor both brevity and speed, focusing on providing information toeach other in short, temporally separated and interleaved snippets.

A recent study shows that mobile usage in 11-16 year olds tendsto be for very short periods, even when voice communication isallowed [7]. It is not only screen size that is limiting the size ofinformation chunks that are being passed: there is clearly a socialfactor as well.

Looking back at the development of technologies over the past 30years, it is clear that devices have got smaller and more mobile,whilst screens have in general improved but have done so at asimilar rate to the shrinkage in the device, such that the overallspace for displaying information is much the same – not thatlarge. As we head towards a more ubiquitous environment [8], itmay be that this trend continues, and so we will not have largeramounts of screen estate to display information on: it will need tobe effective in a small space.

5. MOBILEARN LEARNING OBJECTS

We have encountered this phenomenon in a recent project. TheMobilearn project was an EU Framework 5 project which aimedto support mobile learning in a number of environments across anumber of different platforms [9]. It was designed as a webservice architecture, with components communicating andcollaborating across a network to achieve targeted learningsupport to mobile users. The system had numerous components,but essentially could provide both content (in the form of learningobjects, formatted appropriately for the device, whether phone,pda, tablet PC or laptop), and suggested actions (communication,movement, etc) based on the current context of the user. Thiscontext-aware system provided a perspective on the goals andtasks of the user, their current location and resources, and so on,and provided recommendations of the learning objects to usebased on an analysis of their (hand coded) metadata [10], asshown in Figure 4.

A learning object has many definitions [11] but is essentially thesmallest, meaningful, reusable data chunk (whether text, audio, orvideo) with associated metadata describing it and its pedagogicaland usage credentials. One of the problems in producing thelearning objects was to produce them at a small enoughgranularity so that the context subsystem could provide suitablecontent for the smaller devices. Essentially, it meant that any ofthe content produced had to be chunked into very small units,some of which were combined into larger ones by the adaptivitysystems. In some cases, larger learning objects were defined, butthese had a limited use since they were unsuitable for displayingon the lower-resourced devices such as the phone.

Sensorinput

Content & services

subsystem

Context awarenesssubsystem

UserprofileContext

metadata

Recommendations

Othersubsystems

Userinput

Content &services

Figure 4: Mobilearn context subsystem

6. EMAIL

6.1 Desktop email

Email is another example of shorter communication. Considerfirst email read in a standard client on a desktop or laptopmachine, as shown in Figure 5. This shows the typical designpattern known as overview-detail [12, 13], in which an overviewof all the messages currently in the in box are shown, as well asthe detail of the currently selected message. However, notice thatthe current message has approximately half the screen heightavailable to it, and is sometimes even wrapped at 80 characters bythe mail software. This means that the fold line for email is notthat far down the page, and many users have appreciated that mostof the key information has to appear near the beginning of themessage. For many users, the quantity of email they receive eachday means that they have limited time to deal with each one, andthe software clients provide a paragraph or two that is easy toread: accessing more is certainly possible, but is harder and takestime, and so may not be done as often as would be ideal.

Therefore, many users have developed a writing style thatcondenses information into a few lines, maybe a couple ofparagraphs, and a reading style that tends to read a similaramount. There is no technical reason why emails cannot be verylong and involved, and indeed many are, but these tend to be theexception rather than the norm. Instant messaging is anothertechnology that allows users to communicate with each other,Specifically designed for fast, immediate chat, it supportsconversations via text but again is far easier to use for short piecesof material, not long ones. Messaging therefore encouragesbrevity, with ongoing discussion allowing for evolving precisionin the actual meanings and details of the content.

Figure 5: Conventional email client

6.2 Mobile email

There has been a rapid take-up of devices such as the Blackberry,a PDA-sized device targeted at accessing email whilst out of theoffice, as shown in Figure 6. Many users are dealing with largeamounts of email on this form of device. However, from aninteraction perspective, it has a small screen which cannot displaylong messages easily. It also has small keys: despite being laidout in QWERTY fashion (rather than the phone-based approachof 3 letters per key and a T9 dictionary to aid more rapid textentry) it is still not an ideal device for typing large amounts oftext. Both of these tend to drive users towards sending shortermessages, and wanting to receive shorter ones as well.

We are therefore moving towards a world in which we haveprogressive unfolding of meaning, in which textualcommunication is layered, and where the pithy title and firstcouple of lines may well be all that are seen by the vast majorityof users and readers.

Figure 6: Blackberry device for mobile email

7. PERSONALISATION

As Hodgins states in [14]

“As personalization becomes the key element of learning,subjective metadata become increasingly important. The value ofthe learning object goes up as its associated metadata increase inrichness and completeness. The value of the data objects also goesup as it approaches its smallest potentially useful size.”

In this quote, ‘data object’ refers to the small elements of media ortext or whatever that comprise the basic building blocks of thelearning object – again, there is a trend towards small quanta ofinformation being the most useful and most valuable.

It is the case that we are moving towards targeted, personalizedcontent. This is true whether we consider the increased number ofdigital television channels, allowing us to choose programmes thatwe want to watch, rather than being tied to particular schedules.Portal websites allow us to personalize the news and content thatwe see, whilst the blogosphere provides communities of like-mined people that read each others opinions, often to reinforcetheir own views.

Large stores are focusing on loyalty cards in order to be able trackour spending patterns and hence decide on our personalpreferences, in order to provide us with targeted adverts andinformation. In this targeted world, it is impossible to create newinformation for each customer for scratch, and so new content hasto be created out of the fragments, suitably combined. This meansthat we need to have both the small-scale, modular fragments oftext or media, and sufficient metadata about that in order to beable to combine them sensibly.

In a pervasive future, we are expected to share our dreams,desires, goals, personal information, location and so on with theenvironment so that it can support us in appropriate ways. If weare expected to give away so much private information, we willexpect information that is relevant and directly targeted at us – weare unlikely to be content with receiving the same as someonewho retains their privacy.

8. METADATAMetadata is therefore becoming more and more important:information about information is becoming as important asinformation itself – and potentially more so than detailed, longchunks of it. This is because metadata provides us with the datanecessary to decide what we should combine with what in order toprovide the tailored, individual experiences that users willdemand. It seems likely that future information systems willprovide their content by amalgamating large numbers of smallinformation chunks, deciding on which to use by analyzing theirmetadata and combining them appropriately. The concept ofsubdividing learning into the smallest supportable units, thelearning objects, seems likely to expand to encompass mostinformation processes. We can see this happening already: inmany websites, the trend is away from individually authored andcrafted pages, and towards amalgamating content drawn fromnumerous different sources. This is not only true of the news sitesdiscussed earlier, but also of commercial and academic sites. Themore advanced ones, such as Amazon (www.amazon.com) takethis to the next stage by providing components and details in theweb pages that are dependent on the individual user, drawingfrom purchasing patterns of others and previous experience of theuser on the site in order to provide a tailored, individualexperience – or at least, the impression of a purely personalexperience.

On the web, the rise of ontological structures, RDF and so on,show that the importance of metadata has been recognized, andwhilst there are not yet widely accepted approaches, it seemsinevitable.

As well as having complex metadata describing our short piecesof actual information, we also require appropriate algorithms forcombining these annotated information fragments in a meaningfulmanner, and so information creation systems that evaluate thedifferent potential information fragments and combine themeffectively, for that particular user in that particular context, willbecome more and more critical to the delivery of appropriateinformation.

9. CONCLUSIONSI have argued that technologies are pushing us towards producingsmaller and smaller chunks of information. Whether it is thedevices themselves – phones and PDAs – or the rise of systemssuch as blogging and RSS, they all put pressure on authors tocompact their output into a few pithy sentences. Users alsodemand it: these technologies are blossoming because they areusable and used, and people are wanted access to informationmore and more of the time. And since many users are producersas well as consumers of information, they are becoming familiarwith producing shorter chunks and so tend to want reciprocity inwhat they consume. To provide effective information, we willneed to provide increasing levels of metadata to describe theinformation fragments, and these will have to be intelligentlycombined. If this can be achieved, we can provide individualized,appropriate, effective information to people, whether they areonline, mobile, or in a pervasive space.

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