Multimedia chronicles for business communication

Email is increasingly popular for business communication, often as a means of transmitting, commenting on or collectively creating documents. Although text email is easy to author, it lacks the rich expressiveness of oral media. Multimedia chronicles are introduced as conversations that weave through a fabric of documents, URLs, photographs and other resources. They consist of audio narrations with references to existing digital objects. Over time, an accumulated collection of intersecting chronicles forms a valuable organizational memory. This paper describes a simple point-and-talk interface for composing and viewing multimedia chronicle messages. The design incorporates the semi-automatic creation of a visual representation, in order to improve usability and comprehension for a viewer. In addition, a prototype interface for accessing a collection of such messages is described.