A Weblog Grounded to the Real World

In this paper, we propose a Weblog system called ActionLog, which can associate Weblog entries to real world contexts. The real world context is not only useful for Weblog authors themselves, but also beneficial to communication among people, because people with the same or a similar context can easily find each other. ActionLog collects user actions from both Web-based and other real-world systems. Weblog contents are generated automatically from these user actions with related information. Users can browse and edit these entries as their personal action records and in addition can publish them for experience sharing. We built a practical system as an ActionLog application for conference support. Its main objective is to help people to learn about presentations and to effectively meet other people in a limited amount of time and the least amount of user commitment. There are three main features, i.e., integration of information in the real world and the cyber world, personalization both in information capturing from users and in information providing to users, and persistent assistance throughout the conference.