60 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age necessity but not a suffi cient prerequisite for providing positive experi- ences with personal content. An important aspect is providing fresh views to personal content. One could safely assume that the users know their personal content, at least some of it, at least to some extent. Consider photos, for instance. Knowing the content does not imply that we are able to list by heart all photos taken last year, but rather that it is easy to recognize certain features in the photos (obviously, the same holds for other content types as well): when you see a small thumbnail image of a photo, you may have a fairly good understanding of the event or person the photo presents, even though you cannot make out the details in the thumbnail. In other words, in many cases personal content is familiar and will become more familiar by use. However, what users seldom know is the way in which the different content objects relate to each other, as discussed in Section 3.6.6. Revealing unexpected, fresh views to content, which were once famil- iar, can increase the perceived satisfaction. RELATING TO MADEIRA Despite her bad experiences with the persistence of metadata, Cathy still kept all her old images of plants, people, and places, such as the trip to Madeira. She did not bring her camera, but luckily her friend Deena did. It was such an amazing island! All those fl owers, fern, moss, shrubs. She could have spent years just taking in the fl ora. Deena, a nature buff herself, dutifully docu- mented all the subjects of Cathy’s attention and made photo disks of the images for both of them. Cathy would occasionally browse these images on her computer in search for inspiration, looking for plants that would convey particular moods, and then use those pictures as inspiration for her paintings. She found that instead of keywords, it was usually ok to just browse. Sometimes she asked the computer to show “related” pictures as a slide show. That was fun! The resulting unusual combina- tions were sometimes quite enlightening. Or, sometimes, just plain weird. What can you expect from machines, after all? These so-called wow effects can, at best, be the primary driver for rapid and thorough user adaptation to personal content management systems. Discovering associations between pieces of content and presenting these associations to users is a good start towards providing an enjoy- able personal content experience. Auto-summarizing content is another potential technique that could be applied. The intimacy associated with the system is increased when it appears to know the user’s past, sometimes even better than the user remembers it themselves.