Visitor awareness in the web

The World-Wide Web constitutes an activity space in which people set up and host places that are visited by others. To render web places such as homes, sites, and portals attractive for visitors has become a fundamental concern. However, once a web presence is established, hosts usually maintain little or no awareness of visiting activity. This is not due to any fundamental lack in information – standard HTTP servers log plenty of it - but rather a problem of presenting activity-related information in suitable ways. In this paper we describe a system platform and methods for support of visitor awareness based on integration of ambient information displays with the World-Wide Web.