Chapter 1: Digital Memories and the Personal Content Explosion 5 1.2 You and This Book Although content management is a term often associated with informa- tion managers and Web content managers in enterprises, personal content must be manageable by anyone. The term “personal” provides the point of origin for all discussions in this book. This is the primary reason why we prefer to speak of personal content experience rather than personal content management. Unfortunately, the fi eld of personal content experience is as tangled as any. The terminology does not exist, there are no theoretical frame- works available to understand the topic in a broader context, and the term brings about twice as many opinions as there are speakers. And yet the domain is expanding in the consumer domain like a wildfi re, with more and more technologies, products and services brought to the confused consumers. Therefore, the purpose of this book is to set the stage for understanding, facilitating, and enhancing personal content experience. Several essential factors for a satisfying personal content experience can be identifi ed. These factors are discussed in detail throughout the book, and can be summarized as follows: • Instantaneous ad hoc access to one’s own content with suffi cient quality; • Sharing content and vivid re-living of experiences through content; • Trustworthiness and privacy – confi dence that personal content will be kept safe and preserved; • Joy of (re-)discovering; • Seeing the object as a part of whole (relations); • Exploiting mobility, metadata, and context to make content smart. The above list is just the tip of the personal content iceberg. It is not only individual users or user groups and their experiences and behav- iour that we will discuss; and it is not only the essential technologies that we will show are needed to put all the bits and pieces together. We will also address many societal issues, such as social acceptability and privacy; copyright and liability laws; issues related to mass media and media (re)production; new distribution paradigms, such as viral marketing and super-distribution; new or enhanced business opportu- nities, such as online services for content analysis, processing, and fi l- tering; and so on. Because personal content is inherently tied to many