Look who's visiting: supporting visitor awareness in the web

Individuals, groups and organizations host places in the World Wide Web to attract visitors, but once they have established a web presence they usually maintain little or no awareness of visiting activity. However, the standard web infrastructure supports the capture of detailed activity-related information. In the first part of this paper, we contribute a preliminary study conducted with expert web hosts in different domains, investigating the use of information on visiting activity as feedback for web operation. From this study, we infer general requirements for web awareness support, based on which we have designed two systems aimed to promote more awareness of web activity and visitors. The first is a system supporting ambient notification of web events, enduser configurability, and ambient display for overview and comparison of activity in a web place. The second system moves beyond awareness of web activity to provide glances into the visitors’ sites, introducing reciprocity to the host–visitor relationship. Both systems have been prototyped and deployed in work environments for an evaluation in everyday use. # 2002 Academic Press