324 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age This book has largely concentrated on the status quo of managing and experiencing personal content. This chapter extrapolates some of the issues previously discussed, to paint a vision of the future of per- sonal content. We are not expecting to get it exactly right, as our crystal ball warns us that there are many changes ahead. Still, most of these issues will be crucially important to the area of personal content. Here is a summary of what we foresee: • Personal content will become “smart”, that is, aware of its seman- tics, and get connected to other pieces of content; the origins of a content object will be traceable. • Personal content applications will become interoperable through metadata. • Successful metadata machinery will remain invisible to users in most situations; smart UIs will be metadata-aware. • On-line societies will be crucial for creating, managing, and expe- riencing content – sharing to the extreme, peer-support (recom- mendations, answers), metadata created by social interaction. • Automated functions will be powerful in limited domains. • Metadata magic will rise from machine cognition, data mining, context awareness, ontologies, folksonomies, object decomposi- tion, metadata extraction. • Fake metadata and privacy will be key concerns. • P2P networks will graduate from fi le sharing to metadata sharing. We will now look at these issues in more detail. 8.1 Metadata in the Years to Come Throughout this book, we have stressed the importance of metadata as a key technology that is needed for preventing the personal content boom to explode in our faces. There are some potential directions that metadata-related technologies will evolve. The following factors describe those directions: Drivers: the explosive growth of digital content will drive the need for metadata. Mere fi le attributes, such as name and date, do not suf- fi ciently describe its contents and cannot reveal the fi ne-grained dif- ferences of the content objects that are (partially) created and edited