Introduction

Finding quickly relevant and reliable information on the web is a non-trivial task. While internet search engines do find correct web pages w.r.to a set of keywords, they often cannot ensure the relevance or reliability of the pages' content. A promising approach tries to harness internet users in the spirit of Web 2.0, i.e., making contributions to the web. The idea is that user collaboratively search or browse for information, either directly by communicating or indirectly by adding meta information (e.g., tags, ratings, comments) to web pages. COBS is an ongoing research project to develop such features in a website independent manner using browser add-ons. Currently COBS is available only for Firefox.

Features

For a first glance at the COBS add-on, click on the thumbnails below to see some screenshots, or find here are more detailed presentation of the features. Additionally, we provide a short video clip that presents the current features of COBS. | Rating and Tagging
Users can tag web pages and rate them by means of a 5-star rating scheme
http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_tagging.png'>http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_tagging_thumbnail.png' /> Creating links
Users can create links between visited pages by drag&drop
http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_linking.png'>http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_linking_thumbnail.png' /> Discussion Board
Visitors of web page can post comments or replies to a discussion board assigned to that page.
http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_commenting.png'>http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_commenting_thumbnail.png' /> Online chat
Visitors of the same web page or grouped to the same online chat and can communicate with each other.
http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_chat.png'>http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_chat_thumbnail.png' /> Guided Browsing
User can act as guide for users, i.e., the pages a guide is visiting are sent to the users that follow that guide.
http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_guiding.png'>http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_guiding_thumbnail.png' /> Web of trust
Users can explicitly define which other users they trust.
http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_contacts.png'>http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/svn/media/images/cobs_contacts_thumbnail.png' />

Installation

The COBS add-on comes as a Firefox extension file: http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/files/cobs_0_6.xpi'>cobs_0_6.xpi.

Some features of COBS require the XMPP/Jabber communication protocol. We also provide this add-on file here: http://socialcobs.googlecode.com/files/xmpp4moz.xpi'>xmpp4moz.xpi.

Please see also our installation page for more detailed information about the installation.