[Air-L] Web-tracking tool provides datasets of web-browsing activities for researchers

Christina Xu christina.k.xu at gmail.com
Fri Sep 11 08:53:42 PDT 2009


Thought this might be of interest to those of you studying web-browsing
behavior, or just really cool visualizations!

------------------------------------------

A group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has
launched a new project, eyebrowse <http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/>, which
allows you to record, visualize and share your web browsing history in
real-time.

Eyebrowse is a Firefox plug-in that records visits to websites that you
choose to track on an individual basis.  Your data is presented on your
eyebrowse profile in the form of interesting and insightful visualizations,
allowing you to gain personal and social insights and catch a glimpse of what
Google knows about
you<http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/337791/What_Google_Knows_About_You>.


Currently, most web browsing data is collected by search engine companies
(Google, Microsoft, Alexa…), which is hardly available for public domain
research. Eyebrowse seeks to fill this gap by providing a public repository
of web trails. By making this data available, we hope to support the
creation of open public services that analyze and report major trends on the
web, services that support personalization of the web through collaborative
filtering and other crowd-sourcing techniques, and other as-yet unimagined
services that require a mass of data about the world's interaction with the
web.

Check out some real <http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/profile/emax/>
live<http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/graphs/zamiang/>
profiles <http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/users/> and our page
stats<http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/search/>graphs, which are
accessible from any page via the plug-in
.

Eyebrowse is an open source project
hosted<http://code.google.com/p/list-it/>on Google Code implemented
using Django, Javascript and HTML5. It is
actively seeking users for feedback and beta testing.

happy surfing!
eyebrowse team
http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/



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