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Adobe Building Zoetrope, a Web "Time Machine"
Khuffie writes "Adobe, along with the University of Washington, are developing Zoetrope, an application that will offer a dynamic new view of the web. It is hard to explain on paper, but you can see a brilliant video of the application in action. Essentially, Zoetrope will allow users to travel back in time through a website, and see how the website gets changed. A user can create lenses on the website, for example, focusing on the price of a DVD at Amazon, and see how the price went up and down over the coming months. More interestingly, you can link lenses together across different websites, and for example, see how the price of gas was affected by say, the aggregated google news result of 'war.'"
From the article: "Kris Carpenter, who directs efforts to record Web pages at the Internet Archive, is enthusiastic about the new tool. "This is a fantastic leap forward," she says, adding that Zoetrope could be used as a stand-alone application or eventually become part of the browser. "The advances of the interface are phenomenal in terms of being able to navigate data in a very different way and associate it across websites," Carpenter says. "I think most users have an interest in trying to connect the dots between different sources of information, but there are almost no tools available to make that an easy thing to do." She adds that the Internet Archive is interested in sharing its data with the Zoetrope researchers."