Collecting and Sharing Transient Personal Information Online

Smale, Stephanie (2007)
Collecting and Sharing Transient Personal Information Online. Master's thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, November.

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Abstract

Everyday people share events and small details of their lives with others in multiple online spaces such as blogs, social networking sites, instant messengers and email. The interest of this thesis is in these small pieces of digitized information that people share on a daily basis. We begin with a quantitative study into how individuals appropriate the display name space within instant messengers to broadcast information to their community. Our study reveals that this information falls into three main communication themes: Identification, Information about Self, and Broadcast Messaging. We then expand our findings to the design of a system called Transient Life, which is shown to provide an effortless way for users to collect their daily personal transient information tidbits on the fly. Lastly, we take a look at Transient Life in use. This exploration generates important insights and suggestions on how future tools can improve upon the basic concept put forth by Transient Life.

Bibtex entry

@MASTERSTHESIS { 2007-Smale.MScThesis,
CLASS = { THESIS },
AUTHOR = { Smale, Stephanie },
TITLE = { Collecting and Sharing Transient Personal Information Online },
SCHOOL = { Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary },
ADDRESS = { Calgary, Alberta, Canada },
YEAR = { 2007 },
MONTH = { November },
TYPE = { MSc Thesis },
}