This study suggests reasons for the absence of a growing proportion of the population, the so-called baby boomers, from the otherwise highly popular social networking sites. We explore how people of this age group understand social networking sites and how these understandings fit certain aspects of their life. Designing social networking sites that match older adults' life would increase their possibilities of coping with the changes related to their age and of contributing to the information society. In a qualitative study involving use of an existing social networking site, and group and personal interviews, we found that understanding the internet as a dangerous place, and social networking sites as places of socially unacceptable behavior, hinders the use of these technologies. To include older adults, we propose arrangement of social events for getting familiarized with these services and offering of clear and simple privacy management on the sites. These actions have implications for users of all ages.

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The amount of personal digital media is increasing, and managing it has become a pressing problem. Effective management of media content is not possible without content-related metadata. In this paper we describe a content metadata creation process for images taken with a mobile phone. The design goals were to automate the creation of image content metadata by leveraging automatically available contextual metadata on the mobile phone, to use similarity processing algorithms for reusing shared metadata and images on a remote server, and to interact with the mobile phone user during image capture to confirm and augment the system supplied metadata. We built a prototype system to evaluate the designed metadata creation process. The main findings were that the creation process could be implemented with current technology and it facilitated the creation of semantic metadata at the time of image capture.

Interesting characteristics of large-scale events are their spatial distribution, their extended duration over days, and the fact that they are set apart from daily life. The increasing pervasiveness of computational media encourages us to investigate such unexplored domains, especially when thinking of applications for spectator groups. Here we report of a field study on two groups of rally spectators who were equipped with multimedia phones, and we present a novel mobile group media application called mGroup that supports groups in creating and sharing experiences. Particularly, we look at the possibilities of and boundary conditions for computer applications posed by our findings on group identity and formation, group awareness and coordination, the meaningful construction of an event experience and its grounding in the event context, the shared context and discourses, protagonism and active spectatorship. Moreover, we aim at providing a new perspective on spectatorship at large scale events, which can make research and development more aware of the socio-cultural dimension.