AudioFeeds: a mobile auditory application for monitoring online activities

User participation has transformed the way news travel the globe. With the rise of the 'Web 2.0' phenomenon users have been empowered with the means of creating and distributing informational items, which we call social feeds. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide a variety of tools to facilitate real-time communication among people. But social sites are not limited to personal chat; they also provide an effective means for organizing large groups of people in response to catastrophic disasters. Monitoring these feeds can provide time-critical information, but can easily lead to information overload due to the large amount of data being shared. In this paper we introduce a mobile auditory display application called AudioFeeds that allows users to maintain an overview of activities in different social feeds. AudioFeeds runs on a mobile device and enables users to get an overview of their social networks and spot peaks in activity by sonifying social feeds and creating a spatialised soundscape around the user's head. We conducted a user study looking into different aspects of activity monitoring. Results show that our application provides an effective way for monitoring overall activity levels and allows users to identify activity peaks with 86.1% accuracy even when mobile