5 SYSTEM OVERVIEW

Beside the main display is a smaller color screen that gives the reader an overview of the news available. Since the newspaper has several section pages and only one page can be displayed at a time on the main screen, the map tells the reader about news articles on other pages. The space onto which the pages are laid out is the "newspace". See figure 8.

By clicking with the mouse the reader can indicate interest in certain articles. If a story of interest is found on the front page and there are more stories concerning the same issue on a section page, the system will pan over to the corresponding section page. The user can go back to the front page anytime.

The communication between the article selection process and The Electronic Broadsheet is simple and clean. Communicating with the article selection process over a local network, the display application receives articles that are to be displayed. In return, the display application sends the user's response to the articles shown, e.g., what articles that have been read, how long time was spent on each story etc.

The user communicates with the display application by indicating interest in certain articles. By moving the mouse into the article that is currently being read, the display application calculates know how long time is spent reading each article. By clicking in the article, the reader expresses particular interest in the story. The user's motivation for following these rules is to get even better filters selecting news tomorrow.

The following scenarios illustrate how the system may adapt itself to different users. The two people described live slightly ahead of our time and have access to sophisticated equipment, but all aspects of the electronic newspaper described are implemented in The Electronic Broadsheet.

After reading the remaining articles in the section, Judy knows there is nothing she can or should do. Her weekly report about the media image of the company will for months to come describe the consequences of the accident and how to deal with the negative publicity, but she can use the next hour or two to catch up with the rest of the world.

When she returns to the front page it looks quite different. The articles she read have disappeared - replaced by more recent news. Every now and then a new article comes up. She can see them pop up on the map, while old articles are taken down. When starting to use the system she was worried about losing important information when unread articles were taken down. After a while she realized that only articles with low priority or outdated information were eliminated. Often they were replaced by more recent versions concerning the same issue.

Suddenly a picture of her manager pops up on the personal mail page. She recognizes his face even if it's scaled down on the map. His accompanying message, which just wanted to make sure she was on the right track, reminds her of the report he expects tomorrow. Reading news is not everything she does. There is always a report due and some thought in the back of her head that has to be spelled out. The word processing page is handy for this, no news articles will disturb her there..."

The front page also contains electronic mail from members in the botanical society. They are identified not by their picture, but by their favorite plant. The yellow tulip made it to the top--that's the society president's identification. Today she didn't have much of importance to say, just some random ideas for the next meeting. Bill replies with some of his random thoughts.

More environmental news pops up as he reads his personal mail. Enough is enough--he decides to take a break from disasters. Thank goodness for the comics page..."

* The frame buffer is able to show small video segments. This powerful medium is undoubtedly a part of the newspaper of tomorrow, but today it is a cumbersome source. It is hard to automate the process of digitizing news from television--the only source we have at this point. As a result, there is only a few video sequences available and they have little news information value. They are shown to visitors as a part of the Newspace demo, but is not fully integrated in the newspaper presentation.

* Pictures and figures are also important information in today's papers. Currently, the Newspace project has access to a news figure source, but setting up the system to automatically grab new diagrams has turned out to be a problem. A solution is in progress, and will hopefully be integrated in the near future.

* Electronic mail has not been included as a regular service. Mail can be sent to a demo user, formatted and displayed on the screen, but there is no way to reply to messages without turning to regular UNIX utilities.

* After an article has been formatted, the Electronic Broadsheet only knows about it as a pixmap, i.e. it doesn't know which words a story contains or where they are displayed. In order to increase user feedback granularity this will have to be changed.

* Some user parameters, such as the rate at which articles fade is not variable in the current implementation.