Here as well, it is the cunning and bold surfer making the journey. Against the backdrop of empowerment and chaotic systems, it makes sense to welcome the user as the locus of meaningful action. Tracings are valuable resources, which could reveal individual patterns of behaviour and eventually 'preferences'. Should surfers leave identity vestiges along with their pathways from jumpstation to jumpstation, tracers may begin to track surfer types, just as the Albert Heijn supermarket once wished to track grazer types with their preferred customer cards, before the age, gender and postal code fields were deleted from their database. While tracings might serve as customer profiles, e.g. informing garden centres about the virtual excursions of the amateur botanist, tracers have set their sights on profiling knowledge gatherers.
Rubbers are less interested in what surfers find on their own, or aggregate surfer preferences.
They are intrigued by what webmasters like surfers to know, and by webmasters' 'election' of relevant websites by means of making a hyperlink. Rubbing the linkage of websites treating a particular topic, they aim to reveal potential routings through a thematic network given by the web. Rubbers are interested in the distributed lives topics may lead on the web and in web actors' roles in staging them. Contrary to chaos and jungle theories of the web, they discern networks that are more or less articulated, depending on the degree to which websites share a discourse and are connected through links. To the knowledgeable, free-spirit user, they add the wandering spirits of topics that may be encountered on a diversity of web sites.