community

In this paper, we describe the YeTi information sharing system that has been designed to foster community building through informal digital content sharing. The YeTi system is a general information parsing, hosting and distribution infrastructure, with interfaces designed for individual and public content reading. In this paper we describe the YeTi public display interface, with a particular focus on tools we have designed to provide lightweight awareness of others' interactions with posted content. Our tools augment content with metadata that reflect people's reading of content - captured video clips of who's reading and interacting with content, tools to allow people to leave explicit freehand annotations about content, and a visualization of the content access history to show when content is interacted with. Results from an initial evaluation are presented and discussed.