Connectedness oriented communication denotes a mode of communication in which the activities of communication are more important than the contents of communication. It is targeted at maintaining and enhancing human social relationships. As our lifestyles and societies are shifting along with the progress of Information Technology, communication media that are connectedness oriented will play an important role. In this paper we propose a media called FaintPop, which is an example of such new media that are suitable for connectedness oriented communication. It is a communication media designed for a community, with which the sense of connectedness can be shared among members. Furthermore, it provides a general overview of the communication activities occurring in the community. We discuss several principles and points in designing the media, especially about the interaction of the users. Results and findings from the experiment using the media are reported.

A framework is described for a peer-to-peer information exchange system, and a collaborative information retrieval (IR) scheme for the system is proposed. The aims of the system include smooth knowledge and information management to activate organizations or communities. Conventional server-centric systems are weak because they create information-providing bottlenecks. Accordingly, the proposed framework targets the collaborative inter-working of personal repositories that accumulate per-user information, and accept and service requests. Issues concerning the framework are addressed. One issue is the retrieval of information from another's personal repository; the retrieval criteria of a system are tightly personalized for its user. The system is assumed to employ a vector space model with a concept-base as its IR mechanism. The vector space on one system is very different from that on another system. Another issue is the automated control of the information-providing criteria. This paper presents solutions to the first problem. To achieve IR that provides satisfactory results to a user requiring information from another's personal repository, we need vector space equalization to compensate for the differences in the vector spaces of the personal repositories. The paper presents a vector space equalization scheme, the automated relevance feedback scheme, that compensates the differences in the vector spaces of the personal repositories. We implement the scheme as a system and evaluate its performance using documents on the Internet.