Memento : Adding Time to the Web
During the iMind 2010 event, I came across of this interesting project called “Memento”, The objective of the project is very straight forward but overly ambitious : giving a temporal aspect to your web experience, i.e., allowing you to access the web of past. Citing from their website :
If you know the URI of a Web resource, the technical framework proposed by Memento allows you to see a version of that resource as it existed at some date in the past, by entering that URI in your browser like you always do and by specifying the desired date in a browser plug-in.
Memento primary aims at making web-archived content easily discoverable. Rather than finding out which archive to look for e.g., Wayback Machine, or similar ones, Memento tries to unify the access to past contents via the original URL. However, I do not think that we browse the web like the way they have assumed, i.e., remembering the date when I visited a certain page. Our web experience is primarily search and re-search centric [Have a look at Jamie Teevan's work, in particular her UIST 2007 paper]. I asked Herbert Van de Sompel of Memento, that how such temporal association of web content will improve our fundamental web interaction : search. He mentioned that they are currently looking at content based searching issues in the project and we can expect to have some answers to these questions soon.
If you are interested you can have a look at their technical presentation -