The Participation Payoff: Challenges and Opportunities for Multimedia Access in Networked Communities

Increasingly, multimedia collections are associated with networked communities consisting of interconnected groups of users who create, annotate, share, view, critique and remix collection content. Information arises within networked communities via connections among users and in the course of interactions between users and content. Community-derived information can be exploited to improve user access to multimedia. This paper provides a survey of techniques that combine contributions of community members (i.e., tags) and properties of the community’s networked structure with established techniques (i.e., multimedia content analysis) in order to improve access to multimedia in networked communities. The focus is set on three major areas: annotation, distribution and retrieval. The range of possibilities is quite wide, supporting the conclusion that information derived from the surrounding social community has a high potential to improve access to multimedia content. In short, participation in networked communities has a high payoff.