Buzzaar-en

An Environment and Tool to map your web
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version française buzzaar

« The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is attachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation.( ...)The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged "competence".»

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Rhizome (Thousand Plateaux).

buzzaar : the bazaar rather than the cathedral
The development of digital technologies has brought fundamental changes into our lives, culture and society, and has contributed to the development of a new kind of culture, more participative, where passive audience has been turned into users who have access to tools to create and share contents with their 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.

A lot of personal navigation data is locally stored in users' browser logs. 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.

On the other hand, a lot of commercial companies have designed efficiant tools to analyze and transform users' data into exploitable information about their targeted audiences. However, in most cases, users cannot access this generated information that is kept private.

We strongly believe that data created by users should return to users who should be able to interact with it and share it with others, in order to build a culture of "commons".

Furthermore, in order to give more sense to navigation data and show relations that are otherwise difficult to perceive, we need tools providing new graphical representations, which allow to create dynamic interactive displays where users can see, explore and manipulate (edit) contents. By fostering contextualization and conscientiousness, such tools could also contribute to users’ awareness and lead to their empowerment.

Recombinations : maps and web polyphonies
The web application: 2009 - 2011

buzzaar is a tool and a web site that provide answers to such questions.

Its purpose is to build a free and publicly accessible server (the buzzaar server) providing:
 * a web server; the buzzaar server
 * a firefox plugin - the buzzaar toolbar - allowing users to gather their site visit frequencies and co-frequencies and to store them in a private space on the buzzaar server;
 * a java applet - the webmap manager - running on the server, allowing registered users to (1) visualize their navigation data in the form of interactive graphical webmaps that intuitively represent their interests and navigation habits; and (2) allow them to share their webmaps and collaboratively build a common webmap representing their community as a whole;  This common webmap (as any other shared webmap) can then be used by all registered users and is also accessible to anyone(not necessary registered), and, as such represents a valuable source of public information.

The stand-alone application from 2012

Managing the web server and the techniques for online users' privacy and anonymity was an important part of the first prototype in term of financial and human ressource. It made the futur development of the buzzaar tool more precarious.

We then decided to turn this web tool into an application that users can install on their private machine and run it at a private level. Taking into account the work that already had been done, this seemed to be pratically feasible.

This second prototype consist in a tool providing:


 * A java applet, the webmap manager running on a personnal computer, which allows users to 1) gather their site visit frequencies and co-frequencies and to store them into a database that has been previously created on the users personnal computer, 2) to visualize their navigation data in the form of interactive graphical webmaps, that intuitively represent their interests and habits, and 3) to create, manipulate, tag and share their webmaps.


 * A database that is previously created through standard local database tools, which store data from two web browsers' navigation history file; Firefox and Google Chrome.

Licence and support

Buzzaar is a non profit cooperative project and a FLOSS - Free Libre Open-Source Software -tool. 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.

The project is supported by the Swiss Office of Culture, sitemapping project, and EPFL.

The Buzzaar toolbar and the webmap applet are under the Gnu/GPL license and the content of the buzzaar website is under a Creative Commons license BY -SA in order to contribute to the development of a common culture on the web.

 complete file' pdf paper