Adobe Building Zoetrope, a Web "Time Machine" 133
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.'"
Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
The tool looks really REALLY powerful. They really need to change it so it can be more easily used by the noob though. I would even suggest that the links showing trends can be linked to. That way if you want to make a point in a debate you can point someone to your lensed construct. Or there can be sites that will list interesting correlations like in blogs or w/e. Here it would be VERY useful. If they make it a web-based system with no download it would be much much more powerful again. The only big problem I see is the implementation. Gathering so much info is hard not impossible but! following information as sites move and evolve will be impossible. I think they will need to be able to grab historical data as will as a sites own history... for example instead of linking to your own graph allow linking to google stocks or google trends. A lot of those reach back to the 70s which is more useful than the last 8mnths.
Re:cliches in the digital age (Score:2, Interesting)
My inner pedant would assert that "dial" doesn't mean what you think it means. Meaning comes from usage; etymology just tries to make some sense of it.
But whatever, I'll play along: Actually, I have a rotary phone still hooked up. I almost never use it. In fact, I put it in a guest room. I find it funny (but I'm not sure if my guests do). I do test it from time to time to make sure the network where I live will still handle pulse dialing; surprisingly it will. So I've "dialed" a phone (in the sense you mean) within the past month.
Re:Archive.org (Score:3, Interesting)
Sometimes a gimmick is the difference between something being a major pain in the ass to use and a useful tool, though. Simple user interface improvements can be key, and the wayback machine has a pretty terrible UI (as in, it's very difficult to quickly see how something has changed over days/weeks/months without many, many clicks).
I, for one, would definitely use this to assist with data scraping, which is something I have to do a lot.