How to Define “Place” on the Web
Paul P. Maglio Stephen Farrell Rob Barrett
IBM Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Rd
San Jose, CA 95120 USA
{pmaglio, barrett, sfarrell}@almaden.ibm.com
ABSTRACT
We discuss the question of how to form communities to
facilitate interpersonal interaction among World Wide Web
users, and suggest five basic methods for associating web
users based on their browsing context.
Keywords
Social navigation, place, world wide web.
INTRODUCTION
Three main issues facing designers of information systems
incorporating social navigation are (a) which users should
be made aware of which other users, (b) how should users
be made aware of one another, and (c) how should these
users interact. In this short position paper, we are concerned
mainly with the first of these (but see [4,5] for some
discussion of our approaches to the other two issues). In
particular, we address the question of how to form
communities on the World Wide Web (WWW) by
considering a variety of ways to find boundaries of user
groups based on user activity and web structure. More
precisely, we consider WebPlaces to be locations in web
space that are bound together by usage patterns, user
interests, or web connectivity. Some places are defined by
the structure of the web itself, and others are tied to the way
in which users access the web.
WEBPLACES
In the trivial case, users might form a community when
they are part of the same organization and thus use the same
proxy server to access the web (see Figure 1). In this case,
the users are likely to have similar interests or share similar
views precisely because they are part of the same
organization. This is like forming a community from
people who routinely wait at the same bus stop but travel to
different destinations.
In a slightly more meaningful approach, WebPlaces might
be defined by specific pages or sites (see Figure 2). Many
such isolated places exist on the web (e.g., web chat rooms,
game rooms, etc.), and one system, Virtual Places [6], was
developed to add social awareness and interaction to
individual sites or pages. The notion of place is limited by
the authors of web documents to single documents or sites;
place cannot transcend the accidental structure of the web.
This is a little like forming a community from the people
Figure 1: Users at same page, site, or domain.
getting off the same bus at the same bus stop.
A third method for associating users browsing the web is to
find those who are exploring the same region, that is, who
are visiting pages that are within a few links of each other
(see Figure 3). For instance, one user who is looking for
information on a particular disease might happen be visiting
pages that lie within two or three links of pages others who
are researching the same disease happen to be visiting. By
taking advantage of the topology, well-defined communities
or WebPlaces can be found [3]. This is like bringing
together people who take different bus routes to the same
destination.
Communities can be tied to topics or categories of current
Figure 2: Users exploring the same region
interest.
Traditional chat systems, such as IRC, as
organized around content areas, such as Perl programming
or soap operas.
However, the web opens up new
possibilities for connecting users who have similar interests,
as determined by the topic areas they are currently browsing
(see Figure 4). For instance, users searching for the same
thing at different search engines might be considered to be
in the same WebPlace. This might be like grouping
together people who take different buses but wind up at
similar kinds of destinations, such as museums or cafes.
There are yet other ways to build user groups or
communities. For instance, communities might grow from
the repeated use of predefined paths that groups routinely
Figure 5: Users with similar browsing histories.
formal structures in which they move operate. We have
briefly discussed how to form groups from users who are
(a) visiting the same page at the same time, (b) connected to
the web through the same firewall, (c) exploring pages that
are closely linked together, (d) exploring pages with the
same content, and (e) following similar trails through the
information space of the web. We have begun to explore
these notions of place in our prototype WebPlaces
implementation [4,5].
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Tom Erickson for inspiration, and Andreas
Dieberger for conversation.
Figure 3: Users of the same proxy.
follow using the WebPath Browser [2] or they might be
cultivated from groups of sites where web users naturally
congregate [1]. In the most general case, communities
might be formed from web users with similar browsing
histories (see Figure 5). This is like creating a community
from people who routinely take the same buses.
“Dynamic HTML”
“Dynamic HTML”
“Dynamic HTML”
CONCLUSION
The analogy between our notion of WebPlaces and a
systems of buses and passengers is meant only to be
suggestive. Our main point is that there are a family of
methods for grouping users based on their activities and the
Figure 4: Users exploring similar content.
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