Supporting Cooperative and Personal Surfing with a Desktop Assistant
Hannes Marais
Krishna Bharat
Systems Research Center
Digital Equipment Corporation
Abstract
We motivate the use of desktop assistants in the context of web surfing
and show how such a tool may be used to support activities in both
cooperative and personal surfing. By cooperative surfing we mean
surfing by a community of users who choose to cooperatively and
asynchronously build up knowledge structures relevant to their group.
Specifically, we describe the design of an assistant called Vistabar,
which lives on the Windows desktop and operates on the currently active
web browser. Vistabar instances working for individual users support the
authoring of annotations and shared bookmark hierarchies, and work with
profiles of community interests to make findings highly available. Thus,
they support a form of community memory. Vistabar also serves as a form
of personal memory by indexing pages the user sees to assist in recall.
We present rationale for the assistant's design, describe roles it could
play to support surfing (including those mentioned above), and suggest
efficient implementation strategies where appropriate.
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