NusEye: designing for social navigation in syndicated content

The design of NusEye, an online system for social navigation in syndicated content is presented. NusEye is an information system for syndicated content which is extended to support the collaborative activity of users, also known as social navigation. Dourish and Chalmers (1994) define social navigation as provoking a user to move through an information space guided by the activity of others in that space. NusEye augments syndicated content with social navigation. NusEye allows users to apply ad-hoc keywords, or tags, to sources of Web syndicated information. Applied tags are visible to all users in the system. NusEye can identify the most popular tags and Webfeeds. The entire community benefits from the aggregation and collective tagging efforts of each individual by being able to search tags and/or users in order to find new Webfeed sources. Furthermore, NusEye offers special content analysis based on keyword tags. Users can apply various dynamically updated analyses on the content generated by groups of sources. The major points of design include the selection of an interface in which social communities and networks can form from the use of tags, content analysis that is beneficial for syndicated content, and the presentation of analysis results. A prototype version of NusEye has been built and is currently being used to test and explore the concept of social navigation in syndicated content.