A system called the Web intermediary system (WBI), which enables awareness and user interaction in the Web, is discussed in this chapter. Five sections are included. Section 1 provides an introduction to the problem addressed in this chapter, and section 2 helps readers understand what the integration of awareness in the Web means. This section is composed of four subsections, each of which answers a specific question: how to define a place on the Web, what the notion of place in the Webplaces system is, how users should be made aware of one another on the Web, and how users should interact with one another on the Web.

Section 3 is the heart of the paper, and is dedicated to implementation details. A general overview of the Web intermediary framework is given, followed by a description of the different components of the Web intermediary toolkit (WBI). Finally, all of the details of how the Webplaces system was implemented are given. Section 4 provides an overview of future work and the continuation of the Webplaces project. Section 5 concludes the chapter by giving a summary and presenting some open questions to be addressed in the future. (The conclusion seems a little thin compared to the other sections).

The ideas presented in the paper are very interesting and original; the paper is well written and well illustrated. In general, the quality of the figures is good, however some of them need more details, especially the meaning of the connections and related subjects (for example, figs. 10-1 and 10-5). In addition, long sentences litter the text in some places.

I would suggest the authors add a new section about related work in the domain, since almost of all the references used in the paper were by the authors themselves.