86 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age BOB & THE GANG GO TO CHAMONIX Bob’s activist cell is home to many kinds of people. Love for nature somehow seems to be a common trait in these people – most everybody goes backpacking, farms sheep, plants forest, that kind of stuff. So it’s only, erm, natural, that during the years they have gone out for all those nature outings, when not busy protesting against megacorporations. The Chamonix trip last September was a new experience. Not only was it Bob’s fi rst hike in Haute Savoie, but this time they had decided to record the trip using all possible electronic means. So they got into it in a big way. Everyone brought digital cameras, some had laptops with them (hardly essential mountain gear, Bob still muses), Joe was recording the spacious alpine ambience into his Minidisc, and DV video was all over the place. They kept an e-mail diary with text and multi- media messages from their phones. A travel blog of sorts, once everything was brought together and organized per time and location. Bob borrowed a GPS navigator from Ritchie under the condition that he would geotag all his mountain images. Ritch would have come himself, as he’s been hiking the Alps dozens of times, but his newborn daughter now gave him deeper experiences during those sleepless nights. The cell guys all promised to capture everything for Ritchie’s later enjoyment – well, save that smell of cow dung. Ritch felt that it was smelly enough in their house already what with all that diaper stuff. A large number of personal content objects are created or otherwise acquired (“G” actions in GEMS) with hand-held, mobile devices. The reason why manual metadata entry is considered hard is partially related to the poor text input capabilities of mobile devices as well as other interaction limitations (Chapter 6). The entry problem worsens when the user is moving (which is, by defi nition, the norm with mobile devices). The amount of content objects that should be annotated matters too: you may annotate one object carefully, but not necessarily one hundred objects. Manual metadata is potentially extremely valuable, as the users typically enter things that are important to them, as well as adding semantics to the content. For example, instead of describing that a photo contains two people, the user would probably enter their names. This makes management of data more interesting, as the objects have more meaning. In a way, this signifi es a change from machine-readable data to human-readable information. Even though metadata is generally considered benefi cial, it is not to be expected that users will input large amounts of it. It is practical to assume that for most of the consumers manually entered metadata equals non-existing metadata, even if some users are more active than others. This is because when the amount of content increases, automation of the entry becomes crucial. As a general rule, from the