Visualizing the Crowds at a Web Site

Don't forget to read the paper!

If you had Java, you'd be seeing my applet now.

Controls: The slider at the right controls the time dilation. Clicking on a document icon shows you the base URL of the page and allows you to move it's place on the map.

Concept: This is a visualization of the traffic through the lcs.www.media.mit.edu web site. The dataset here is roughly two days starting at 11AM Monday, November 2. Each document icon represents a part of the web site, and each circle represents a visitor. The clock in upper right is the current time from the logfile.

The map exploits the hierarchical nature of our web server. Each document icon represents a group of pages, all pages that share the same first two directory names. For example, the web page "/people/nelson/courses/social-visualization/final/" is shown on the icon "/people/nelson", as are all of my web pages. Web pages on our site break down into roughly four topics: Software Agents, Synthetic Characters, Gesture and Narrative Language, and Epistemology and Learning. Each topic is placed in one quadrant of the display. In addition, there are four kinds of pages: a page for the topic as a whole (shown in red), for a project (green), for a person (blue), or for a course (yellow).

Individual people are shown as small coloured dots. The colour of the dot indicates where they came from: red for .edu, green for .com, and blue for everyone else. When a person moves to new part of the web site, their dot is erased and drawn at the new spot. Usually people just move to the same group of pages (for example, from one of Pattie's pages to another): in that case, you see their dot jitter a bit. People fade out if they haven't accessed the site in five minutes.

Compatibility: Write once, run maybe. I've seen this applet run successfully under Linux JDK 1.1.7 appletviewer, Linux Netscape Navigator 4.08, Windows NT MSIE 4.0, and Windows 98 Netscape 4.5. It might or might work elsewhere. It definitely requires a browser with Java 1.1 that can deal with compressed .jar files.