The Krakatoa Chronicle: An Interactive Personalized Newspaper on the Web
Tomonari Kamba, Krishna A. Bharat, Michael C. Albers · 1995
This paper describes The Krakatoa Chronicle, a highly interactive, personalized newspaper on the World Wide Web (WWW). It is intended for Java-savvy WWW browsers such as HotJava, and is architecturally quite different from conventional Web-based newspapers. Its high interactivity and powerful personalization are the result of sending an interactive agent along with the text of the newspaper to operate within the user's Web-browser. The agent keeps a network connection open to the WWW server site to fetch resources dynamically, and for updating the user's personal profile as it garners relevance feedback. Users are provided a variety of article browsing options such as scrolling, maximizing, resizing, and the ability to "peek." These operations not only enhance the reading experience in ways conventional newspapers cannot, but also transparently provide information to our agent about the user's locus of interest. Ours is the first Web newspaper to attempt a realistic rendering of a newspaper, with a multicolumn format and embedded custom widgets for easy browsing. We provide dynamic layout control mechanisms that let the user specify how personal and community interests should be interpreted by the agent in designing the layout.