Zoetrope Project Aims to Archive the Web
The web changes fast, what you see today will be gone tomorrow. That ephemeral nature means that looking at information over time can be very difficult. Google’s new visualization API attempts offer novel ways of looking at data over time, but for the average user, it remains a difficult task.
However, there’s an interesting new tool on the horizon — Zoetrope. Zoetrope is a joint project between Adobe and researchers at the University of Washington and it hopes to make the task of find archived Web information or looking for patterns over time much easier.
The core idea is that, like the Internet Archive, pages are stored in the Zoetrope database and you can then isolate an element in a webpage and see how it looked two years ago, five years ago or more, as well as interacting with it in real time.
For instance, you might isolate a price of an item on Amazon and see how it has changed over time to figure out if the current price is a good deal. Or perhaps you want to see what the top news stories were a year ago — just isolate an element of the New York Times and Zoetrope will offer a slider to travel back in time.
Much of the information Zoetrope appears to offer is accessible through other means, but the Zoetrope interface looks very slick and the ease with which it works moves the idea out of the realm of researchers and into an application that anyone can figure out.
“There are so many ways of finding and manipulating and visualizing data on what we call ‘the today Web’ that it’s kind of amazing that there’s no way to do anything similar to the ephemeral Web,” says Dan Weld, a UW computer science and engineering professor who helped develop Zoetrope.
And unlike Google’s visualization APIs, Weld says Zoetrope is aimed at the casual researcher, “it’s really for anyone who has a question.”
The main stumbling block to Zoetrope is that it currently only archives roughly 1000 sites. Hardly an internet archive, but the engineers behind the project say they’re working on ways to scale the system to encompass the whole web.
So far there doesn’t seem to be an actual download available to play with, but the video above certainly makes Zoetrope look interesting. In addition to the video there’s an announcement on the University of Washington site and a paper from a recent symposium on user interface software and technology, which offer some more technical details.
[via The Register]
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