Blogging Interface and Access
Figure 2. OBlog content browsing and blogging interface.
OBlog supports a web based interface for browsing the captured and linked multimedia data and creating office blogs. A user can browse the multimedia content with a calendar interface and select from many different types of captured contents, e.g., video clips, meetings, whiteboard images, from the content selector panel, as shown in Figure 3. A daily timeline is also present for easy retrieval of content. The timeline starts from 6am and ends at 11pm. A 24 hour timeline that includes non-work hours can be used for surveillance purposes as well. A user can click on one of the thumbnail images to bring the content to the content view panel.
Various content available in OBlog is shown in Figure 3. Note that, for some content types, the user is presented with further options in the content viewer panel. For example, for meetings, a user is presented with a "view" option in which they can connect to the meeting server to watch the entire meeting. If the content type is whiteboard, presented with "view image," "view enhanced," and "print" options. When the user views the enhanced version, an automatically cleaned version of the whiteboard image is displayed. For document images, the options are "view image", "search Internet", "search desktop", and "print." If the image is a business card, then the user is presented with "search visitor's kiosk" option where visitor database is searched for matching visitor information.
Figure 3. Content/daily timeline views of different content types (a) office conversations (b) meetings (c) user's computer screen (d) whiteboard (e) document (f) business card images.
The blog editor (next to the content browser) allows users to easily select multimedia contents, annotate them and compose multimedia documents in the form of blogs. When the user clicks on the "select this" button in the blogging interface, placeholders (text) for the media content is inserted in the blog area indicating the media type and the source. There is also the option of marking start and stop points for a media item. This is particularly useful for media with time dimension such as video and screen capture data. Users can then insert comments around the media items in the blog editor. An example of a blog with a regular image, a business image, an office conversation, and a user's computer screen is shown in Figure 4. Clicking on any of the time-based media items invokes playback and clicking on any of the image items displays a separate window that shows the high resolution image.
Figure 4. Example blog that includes a regular image, business card image, office conversation, and PC screen image.
