Travel scrapbooks: Creating rich visual travel narratives

The convergence of the Internet and ubiquitous technologies offers an unprecedented level of convenience for information collection, accessing, and sharing through mobile devices and Web services. Mobile devices have become increasingly context aware and connected to the Internet, which lowers the barriers for capturing and sharing contextual information (e.g. location and time). Web applications are increasingly taking advantage of the so-called ´long tail´, offering specialized services to a small number of users and allowing them to annotate, produce and consume relevant information. This paper presents travel scrapbooks, an online service that automatically stitches information together from various online sources based on geotagged photos from social networks, and visually presents the information to the user in the form of a scrapbook metaphor.