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Turn your web navigation into buzzaar webmaps

The development of digital technologies has brought fundamental changes into our lives, cultures and societies. Social networking media user generated sites and peer-to peer networks have contributed to the development of a new participative culture where users have access to tools to create and share contents with peers.

As web users, we spend significant time online, searching for contents and visiting numerous web pages. These actions leave traces that can be collected, typically within web server logs. These data represent potential sources of valuable information for various private and public purposes.

Commercial companies have well understood how useful the above mentioned data can be if properly analyzed and transformed into exploitable information for their targeted audiences. Meaningful analysis, representation and comparison of actions, habits and navigation history of web users can help them to better understand and exploit the knowledge that these data contain.

However, in most cases, users cannot access the generated information that is kept private although the original data have been created by the users themselves.

A lot of personal navigation data is also locally stored in users' browser logs (navigation history) that contain visit frequencies and, if specific browser plug-ins are used, visit co-frequencies. However, there are currently no popular and easy to use tools to exploit these data and they remain quite difficult to share in an efficient way.

We strongly believe that data created by users should be made available to them so that they can interact with them and share them with others, in order to build a culture of commons, a participative and distributed knowledge, part of our digital culture.

Buzzaar is a non profit cooperative project and a FLOSS - Free Libre Open-Source Software -tool, in order to contribute to the development of a common culture on the web. The team is composed of the netartists from the meetopia community and researchers from the EPFL Artifical Intelligence Laboratory, LIA and the Faculty of Electrical Engeneering of the University of Sarajevo.

Buzzaar is supported by the Swiss Office of Culture - Sitemapping project and the EPFL.

buzzaar concept 04 | 2013