In the keeping things found department...

James Wen offers (abstract/pdf) a set of suggestions for improving revisitation -- one of them is do your homework. 

The fresh suggestions, quotage in italics:

• Create a complete but transient tool
• bookmarks last too long
• the mozwho approach is complete at least for the session
  
• Allow users to retrace their surf session:
• the back button is *lossy*
• what percentage of users know about the history sidebar?  less than 1/2 in my experience and far less than that use it.  also imxp, they find value in using it but generally say "i wouldn't have thought to go there"
• the homepage is one way to integrate additional functionality within the current action set of the user
  
• Use of thumbnails to aid in the recognition of images
• Yeah, I know. Working on it.

At the conclusion, the author suggests a webvcr like system -- though that's done as well.

ADDENDUM: JW published a marketing page for "serf serf" in 97.  Interesting.  Addresses AHix's recent question on when to categorize marks:

How did you know that the site on potatoes should have gone in the "vegetables" folder when you had already placed it in the "idaho" folder?  This was before you found so many nice sites on vegetables that you decided to create a folder just for them?

It also provides guided tours, a long standing (...) hypertext idea. |||
Posted at NaN:NaN

Levels in Browsing

Thinking about the tasks within browsing, I resolved to add the 2nd stage of page processing in the "sextant" code.  It will examine the links of the current page, checking for their presence in the jsobject/ram datastore.  It will note this in a the current page object.  This serves as a ideal way to layout a force-based visualization, as in the awesome spring viz of "browsing icons".

Neil recently offered a workaround to a deal breaker bug that was killing the url bar when the sextant progess listener was running.  In credit, the Venkman Javascript Debugger was essential in being able to characterize this problem.

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Posted at NaN:NaN

OS2 WebMap ?

Tracking references to OS2 WebMap, file 'em in the notes if you got em. Peter Bomel's work from the 94 WWW conference uses the name "webmap" and has some very interesting analyses.  It's interesting that a circular layout was considered, but not a spiral visualization as prototyped in mozWho.

The "horizon tree" is of most interest to me, though the full size image is 404, here's an excerpt. It presents a sensible layout and trimming strategy for the graph that is browser history.  In the image below, visit order is numbered.

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Posted at NaN:NaN