Chapter 3: Mobile Personal Content Uncovered 53 Content is data that is targeted at human access, including individual data objects and combinations and collections thereof. It is meaningful to the person dealing with it. It is obvious that as long as the defi nition is subjective, the term cannot be defi ned unambiguously. However, for the purposes of this book, the present defi nition suffi ces.5 What immediately follows from the above is the term content object, which refers to a single piece of content, such as a song, or a combination, such as a photo slideshow with audio commentary. We still need to defi ne what makes content personal. Put another way: “Do you have personal content stored in your computer? What makes your content personal?” What is personal to you may not be per- sonal to your best friend. Once again, some characterization is in order. Your relationship to the content does seem important. Perhaps we could defi ne personal content as: Personal content is content that the user has a relationship with. The question now is: what is a relationship? We expect that some interaction has always taken place with content before it becomes personal, be it shooting a photo or rating a song. In other words, per- sonal content has been experienced, and the term “relationship” refl ects the interactions and experience associated with a piece of personal content. One could conclude that content becomes personal through creation or use. An obvious fl aw is that the above defi nition does not consider whether you are actually controlling the content or not, which would also make your friend’s MP3 collection your personal content, should you happen to like it. Thus the defi nition needs to be amended, for example: Personal content is content that the user has a relationship with, and is in possession of or has control over. For instance, consider your favourite TV show. You watch the show, and at the same time you capture it with your personal video recorder (PVR). Once the show is over, you own a persistent copy of it. Obvi- ously you are able to control the copy stored in the hard drive of your PVR. But what about the video stream at the time of broadcasting? According to our defi nition, it is not personal since you are not able to control it. We still need one more addition. You may have a relationship with the document that your employer expects you to fi nish today. What we think is an essential part of personal content is the voluntary nature of the relationship. To complete our characterization, we state that: 5 See also (Boiko 2005, p. 5) for more discussion on the defi nition of the term.