Adobe Advanced Technologies Lab: Zoetrope

Technology Review has an article about a new tool called Zoetrope developed at Adobe's Advanced Technologies Lab by Mira Dontcheva. The article includes a video of Zoetrope in action.

Zoetrope gives the user access to a range of data interaction tools that harness snapshots of a web page over time. The user can use the DOM to interact with individual components of a page, especially data driven components. "Lenses" can be place over these data-driven areas and the data can be seen over a temporal period. These changes can be graphed or visualized using Zoetrope and can be linked with other lenses on the same page or even other sites. This is truly incredible software. The web is really becoming a giant database and we are reaching a point where tools are popping up all over the place to harness this data and visualize it so that it becomes meaningful in everyday contexts.