The Information Ecology group at DSTC conducts research about how to capture, manage and exploit the context of human computer interaction. Current work focuses on two themes: capturing the context implied by written language using what might be termed "Ankle Deep Semantics" techniques and building software that effectively accounts for the social environment in which information is gathered, managed, presented and shared. This talk concerns that latter theme.

The "ecology of use" that surround weblogs and the Rich Site Summary (RSS) XML format create enormous volumes of timely, news-style information with strong contextual connections and clear social intent. The information is hard to navigate, hard to find and hard to interpret. Our group has begun to construct a prototype called Nexus whose purpose is to gather information of interest to groups of users as it arises. Our research centres around how to enable users to convey what is "of interest" to "groups", each of these concepts being rich, contentious and problematic.

This talk will briefly overview the RSS ecology as we understand it, summarise our attempts to design and build systems that account for the social environment, outline the Nexus prototype and make some vague predictions of our research goals.