Chapter 3: Mobile Personal Content Uncovered 49 such as disk drives, networks, etc. Navigating in the folder structure and performing operations on fi les based on their name and path is referred to as fi le management. 3.1.1 From File Management to Content Management Essentially, as far as personal content experience is concerned, fi le management relates to managing fi les and fi le structure (that is, creat- ing, copying, moving, and renaming the actual fi les and directories) by explicit interaction with the fi le system, regardless of the information that the fi les contain. Content management, on the contrary, includes generic operations – over all content types – that concern the actual contents and interactions with it. Hence, content management includes tasks such as editing, indexing, transcoding, controlling versions, sharing, and searching, regardless of the underlying technology and the way content is stored and accessed (for discussion between fi le system and content databases, see section 5.2). As we pointed out in Chapter 1, content management is often considered as a process that information managers and Web content managers need to take care of in large enterprises (Boiko 2005). The key difference is that the content management systems we are address- ing in this book are targeted at all of us, including those not interested in technology, and those who hate computing. All of them will eventu- ally have to start using some computing platform for storing and retriev- ing their personal content. This is the kind of user base we are discussing here. A step beyond fi le management, towards managing content instead of fi les, is providing access to the content based on content type, not by its location, and allowing operations based on the contents of the fi les themselves (Figure 3.3). The next step is allowing virtual containers. A good example is 1 Picasa 2, an application targeted towards managing photo collections. Picasa 2 allows the user to create photo albums, referred to as labels, which may contain photos from any existing folder. The labels contain links to the actual locations of the photos. Labelling allows the same photo to be included in many collections without having to make 2 explicit copies. Furthermore, it frees the user from some of the burdens related to fi le management. The application takes care of all extra logic required to implement the virtual containers. 1 http://picasa.google.com/ 2 Links, or shortcuts, are in use in many fi le systems as well. However, the way they are used and managed is similar to regular fi les.