AtomsMasher: PeRSSonalized Information Delivery and Management on the Web

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Description/Abstract

Over the past two years, social networking sites have fostered a new kind of data publication: personal feeds about schedule, location, music playing, activity and so on. While these feeds have been mainly used at face value as status reports for human readership, we present AtomsMasher, a tool that uses these feeds as a computer's context to inform automatic actions: an update of a current location query, compared with a calendar entry's meeting location and time can trigger an automatic "I'm late; I'm on the way" to necessary parties. This light-weight (though surprisingly complex) automation frees us from manually updating multiple sources; likewise the information context can privilege the presentation of other sources: if the news is not about a band i listen to, don't show me upcoming gigs. To deliver this utility however, we have needed to address two key challenges: operationalizing data sources with little original structure and providing interaction approaches to support non-specialists defining rules for these sources' interaction. The contribution of this work is the demonstration that a simple property/value extension to RSS feeds enables a new kind of interaction with information: even non-specialist users can define precise rules to take control of or successfully delegate the handling of the high volume of both personal and public information we produce and must process.