Browsing the Web, One Sentence at a Time 164
rtmyers writes "A really simple yet radical idea: break web pages down into sentences, and then have the browser walk through sentences and do useful sentence-level things. This is the paradigm shift behind the product called Infowalker, which unfortunately is implemented as an IE toolbar, but would be fabulous as a feature built into Mozilla or Opera.
Currently implemented features include sentence-level interfaces for TTS, translation, large-type display, and the funkiest of all, dynamic display of an image pulled off the web based on keywords extracted from each sentence -- hey, turn all your web pages into slide shows today! Then there's the feature to show an Amazon product related to the sentence you're reading -- which presumably is the revenue model behind the product, but turns out to also be surprisingly useful.
This might not be for everyone, but it could just be the first real change in the browsing model since the earliest browsers starting throwing text up on the screen more than a decade ago. And apparently, Infowalker's architecture allows for pluggable third-party sentence-level "behaviors", with the potential for the development of a whole ecosystem of sentence-level functionality in browsers. And it seems Infowalker can also be controlled by strategically placed custom CSS tags within the HTML, raising the possibility of a new class of web pages especially tuned for this sentence-based approach."
Another way to browse (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Another way to browse (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Another way to browse (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another way to browse (Score:2)
Re:Another way to browse (Score:2)
I want that 5 minutes of my life back and, judging from the other posts here, I could start a class action to try to get it. Of course, that would just end up wi
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Is it just me? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another way to browse (Score:2)
A novel idea... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A novel idea... (Score:3, Funny)
April Fools? (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on. Who reads that way. We read by browsing, skimming, skipping. We do our own keyword search in our heads and skip the all-to-common fluff and bad writing that's crammed into Web pages.
For a 6 year-old, this might work. But they are missing some key points on how Web pages are consumed in the real world.
What? (Score:5, Funny)
OK, I only ready the first couple of lines of this article, but I am sure that is where all of the relevant info was.
I'd type more, but my 7 seconds of attention have just expir
Re:April Fools? (Score:5, Funny)
Good point.
O! And you skipped the second "o" in "too". Such grammatical confusion of homonyms I've found to be all-too-common to nearly any writing on the web longer than two sentences.
Re:April Fools? (Score:2, Funny)
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of slashdot
I hold with those who favor grammar.
Re:April Fools? (Score:2)
I've seen a couple of errors in newspaper articles that match "helpful grammar suggestions" from clippy. I think editing is now mostly done by the writer + word processor. Sell your blue pencil stock.
Re:April Fools? (Score:2)
Right : (Score:5, Interesting)
Good precis is a skill, and a creative and demanding one at that. A computer will no more likely do a good summary of a lengthy text, than it could write a novel.
Re:Right : (Score:2)
Yes, making summaries of texts is a good idea...
But that's not what this Infowalker thing does. It simply displays the text of the page in a separate window, and optionally reads it out, with or without translation. You can adjust the display/voice speed and some other things as well.
Great for visually impaired people, but otherwise I see little use for it.
And yes, I have IE installed, but I don't normally use it - honest!
Blah (Score:5, Informative)
In my books, the more ads I see about a product, the less I want the product, because the product must be sold at an inflated cost to pay for advertising, or it must be a poor product if they are pushing it so hard. Word of mouth is best.
Re:Blah (Score:5, Insightful)
OK... just for fun, I installed Infowalker and ran it on this page.
The sentence "would be fabulous as a feature built into Mozilla or Opera" resulted in an advert for Wagner CDs, and "show an Amazon product related to the sentence you're reading" - popped up a little map of Brazil, and an advert for "Live Sentence" by Alcatrazz on CD.
Methinks they've a little more work to do if they're going to make their related advertising into an effective revenue stream... at the moment it's more like "hey, here's some random CDs with the same words as your sentence!"
Privacy and Spyware Concerns? (Score:2)
You almost don't *need* spyware with that kind of granularity, but my first reaction to "IE Toolbars" is always to ask "what spyware things does it do?" Some of them are really ugly stuff.
BZZZT! Buzzword alarm! (Score:5, Funny)
Agghk! Black-flagged on the opening lap!
Pr0n (Score:2)
English? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it just me, or did all that make no sense what -so-ever?
Re:English? (Score:2, Funny)
I could have sworn. (Score:2)
Re:I could have sworn. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, like a lot of buzzwords, "paradigm shift" used to mean something. Real paradigm shifts are wondrous, exciting things. They also don't happen very often. I'd say only three have happened in computing in my lifetime: the switch from timesharing systems (mainframes and minis) to PC's as "what computers are" in the public eye, the change from CLI's to GUI's as the standard method of interacting with computers, and the way the Internet has subsumed the old hodgepod
Re:I could have sworn. (Score:2)
Re:I could have sworn. (Score:2)
I also don't see the connection between using Citrix and using mainframes. In fact, most (probably all) Fortune 500 companies aren't going back to mainframes -- they never left in the first place. Are you perhaps trying to relate terminal usage and other
Re:I could have sworn. (Score:2)
Re:I could have sworn. (Score:2)
A paradigm is a model, a set of assumptions about the way the world works. A simple example is the Copernican model of the solar system. The Earth revolves around the sun. Previously, the common view was that the Sun went around the Earth.
Paradigms certainly do shift, and it's a very different process to natural evolution. When Copernicus said "Hang on a minute, the Sun doesn't go
Re:I could have sworn. (Score:2)
Re:I could have sworn. (Score:4, Informative)
If you ever want to claw your own eyes out and need some motivation, just read that book. He comes up with the concept of "Paradigm Shifts" and explains them in exceptionally excruciating detail.
To be fair, it was a fairly revolutionary concept of it's day -- perhaps the best proof of this point is that it took managers 30 years to latch onto the concept and suck all the usefulness out of it. Managers then, of course, proceeded to use it incessantly and inappropriately to describe any change they needed to implement, revolutionary or not.
Re:I could have sworn. (Score:2)
Re:I could have sworn. (Score:2)
Alas, you are wrong. Paradigm shifts are a constant theme in the marketing world. Go figure.
links in a ball and chain (Score:2)
Making a pig's ear... (Score:5, Insightful)
SPAM (Score:2)
Privacy Policy? (Score:2, Insightful)
2)show an Amazon product related to the sentence you're reading
I am always nervous of any IE plugin (especially search bars) that do not come with a privacy policy.
Seeing as it is most certain that some information must be sent from your computer in order to perform the above tasks, I would think some sort of privacy policy is in order.
Paradigm Shift...Run Away! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Paradigm Shift...Run Away! (Score:2)
T3h evil... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweet Zombie Jesus, I did not spend my time turning off animated gifs, turning off Flash, stopping those stupid "download this plugin" buttons [slashdot.org] from popping up, using Google instead of Antarti.ca [antarcti.ca]'s let's-fly-over-the-web-in-a-low-flying-fighter-jet search engine, and running search-and-destroy missions on the remaining dancing baloney just to turn every web page into a goddamned sentence-by-sentence Powerpoint(tm) presentation!
In the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who the hell comes up with this crap?
Re:T3h evil... (Score:3, Funny)
Moving (link to exercise gear) slowly further offtopic (link to a "hip new internet lingo dictionary" on Amazon), I (link to "I, Robot" movie) wonder (link to effective thinking seminars) if perhaps the already ridiculous (link to inday music band) noise (link to 80's metal band) to signal (link to electronics gear * 2) of english (link to ESL courses online) isn't a little unconducive (link to physicist's delight) to further disruption (link t
Wow! (Score:2)
nothing particularly radical about it (Score:2)
It's less common to expose this to users, but it isn't clear that the sentence level is what should be exposed anyway. Better semantic markup of web pages into related sections or topics might be useful. But given that we can't even get authors to generate correct HTML the way it is, it's doubtful much would come of such a
No Screenshots?? No FAQ?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No Screenshots?? No FAQ?? (Score:2)
I'll wait to see some reviews before I investigate further...
-MT.
Re:No Screenshots?? No FAQ?? (Score:2)
it didn't grab me as being that useful, i couldn't get the product thing to work or the URL preview. what did work was slow and not very user friendly.
Sounds familair... Like a GNOME or M$ project... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sounds familair... Like a GNOME or M$ project.. (Score:2)
What a pain that would be. If I want information, **I** will decide I need information. I do not need some background process to decide for me.
In your specific example, suppose I was chasing down a intermittant bug. After the 40th time seeing "Bug 1565 is....", I would gladly junk the whole system.
This seems too much like Clippy: "I see you have bug 1565 again. Would you
Re:Sounds familair... Like a GNOME or M$ project.. (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the things I would love to see it do, for instance, is if it brought up contact information about a specifc person, I would love to see which time zone they live in and their local time.
Web into powerpoint == good thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, this type of content decompostion technology highlights the superiority of markup langages (e.g., HTML) over page layout languages (e.g. PDF). HTML retains more of the meaning of the content while PDF is basically a fancy way of converting content into a screenshot. Try extracting sentences from a PDF, what a PITA.
One sentence at a time... (Score:2)
Atomic view of content (Score:2, Interesting)
It's the idea of each thought being an atom of the content tree, captured in either a sentence, sentence group or paragraph. If each thought is a unique object, then each can
Re:Atomic view of content (Score:4, Interesting)
WordNet [princeton.edu] is well known although not that powerfull.
Common sense [mit.edu] is really a beta but still its a big database.
Cyc [opencyc.org] is really cool, but not all free. Look at cycL the language they developped.
I think a simple thing like having integrated access to wikipedia articles or dictionny.com from the browser would be cool. Amazon I don't know.
Screenshot (Score:2)
Re:Screenshot (Score:2)
Re:Screenshot (Score:3, Informative)
http://homepage.mac.com/trash80/misc/info.png
custom == invalid (Score:2, Interesting)
From the site: "Works seamlessly with Internet Explorer--keep browsing just as you do now"
Uh, I use Mozilla Firefox because it embraces the current standards, especially CSS.
"custom CSS tags within the HTML"
I hope this means a custom external stylesheet, not invalid markup within the page; their site isn't exactly using the current standards or embracing CSS either.
And, most importantly, at least try to go through the system (W3C) before resorting to custom markup such as this. How does this relate to t
Re:custom == invalid (Score:2)
For me, the fact IE doesn't break when it encounters <style> tags is a good thing. call me crazy, but I prefer things to not break.
Who writes this shit. (Score:2)
Well i gave it a go... (Score:3, Insightful)
If only they had selected a niche browser (Score:2)
Yeah, how could they choose the most popular browser when there are non-MS broswers out there. After all, it shouldn't be about business or technology, but political correctness.
Re:If only they had selected a niche browser (Score:2)
Even if I had to use Internet Explorer, which I haven't used in months.
We minority platform users are probably around 10% of Slashdot users, so we really count for a project like this.
D
Re:If only they had selected a niche browser (Score:2)
If you step outside of the mainstream, you can't expect everyone else to follow you ;)
Re:If only they had selected a niche browser (Score:2)
D
How much does Taco charge to post this stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you *noticed the signal to noise ratio we're dealing with here?
This is the most tedious and worthless 'enhancement' I've heard of in at least a year.
Unless they somehow developed a scheme for automatically detecting useful content in a webpage, I'm going to keep visually skimming them with my own two eyes until i find the one tidbit of useful data mixed in with all the dross.
I can just see this tool. "Ok, no, that sentence didn't help. Nope, not that one eather . . . no . . . no . . . . no . . . . god this is boring . . "
sentence tag (Score:2)
Sentences to images (Score:2, Informative)
Nonsense! (Score:5, Insightful)
What they've come up with is an ingenious method of directing advertisements, but they've completely failed to provide any reason for consumers to use it. Hey, I've got an even better idea! Let's give away a set-top box that hooks up to your cable/satellite receiver and overlays small ads while you watch TV! Advertisers will love it because they can target ads based on what people are watching. Now all we have to do it get people to hook this box up to their TV. Perhaps if we have it overlay the time and temperature as well, people will want it for its utility....yeah...that's it...
* "whole language" is where you don't teach kids to read at the phonetic/letter level, but instead just let them learn whole words "naturally" by following along in their own book while the teacher reads aloud. If this seems ridiculous and nonsensical, that's because it is. It was dreamed up by a fool who "observed" that when one reads, one doesn't sound out individual letters, and then assemble the letters into words; no, one just reads words. The logical flaw here is the assumption that there is no letter-level parsing when, in fact, there is-- it's just not noticable as a distinct step because we do it so efficiently.
Re:Nonsense! (Score:2)
Re:Nonsense! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, we do take in whole words at a time when we already know the word, but it's largely based on recognizing the letters at the endpoints. Taht is the mian rseoan tihs snctecne is sltil smwoaht rdaelbe.
I'm sorry to say that there's little objective information to go on as far as condemning "whole language" -- the phon
Re:Nonsense! (Score:2)
Well, the problem isn't limited to "word" vs. "letters" thing. Whole Language says that words only have the meanings that the reader brings to them, and that so long as the internal symbology is
Re:Nonsense! (Score:2, Informative)
What usually happened in places where whole language "failed" is that a bunch of bureaucrats or
Behind most "clever" web technology... (Score:2, Insightful)
Swell. So it's adware. Cleverly disguised as.. uh.. adware?
Sure, it's based on a novel idea... but i'm betting this idea was spawned in a thinktank where the single goal was to find a new form of targetted advertising, and the biggest challenge they faced was giving users a reason to download it. of all the "cool things" it says it can do, the only item that seems worth pursuit is the inline language transl
Sentences Have Context Too (Score:5, Interesting)
So far as I'm concerned, this just feeds into the "sound-bite" culture vortex that television has been sucking us into for the last 2 decades. Why do we feel the need to strip the nuance and subtlety from everything?
This study [yahoo.com] seems to confirm what I've always thought about our soul-less Info-culture. I love technology, but we need to be careful that it doesn't strip away our humanity.
Thank you for that. (Score:2)
Don't get me started on the writing on the web. (Whatever happened to Grammar Nazi?) My degree isn't in Com
Their Mission (Score:3, Insightful)
"Our mission is to the enhance the world's web browsing experience. To do this, we bring the latest innovations from psycho-ergonomics, neuro-economics, and compu-architectonics together in the form of completely free products which are ridiculously easy to use and amazingly useful."
Ummmmm...psycho-ergonomics?
neuro-economics?
compu-architectonics?
Are these made up terms?
Or I am I just that out of touch.
Re:Their Mission (Score:2)
psycho-ergonomics?
neuro-economics?
"psycho-ergonomics" makes sense -- it relates to thinking in the same way that ergonomics relates to moving -- but the other two are clearly made-up buzzwords.
Yet more proof... (Score:2)
Fundamentally Flawed (Score:2, Interesting)
Surprise, Surprise... The Poster Wrote The Toolbar (Score:5, Interesting)
I did a little digging into our poster "rtmyers."
A google search on his email gave me this page, which reveals to us his name.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/balsa-list/2001-MaThen I looked up who registered NaturallyOpen.com at Register.com.
WHOIS lookup on Register.com [register.com]Surprise, Surprise... the same guy.
He could have told us in the post that he wrote the thing.
Re:Surprise, Surprise... The Poster Wrote The Tool (Score:2)
Autosummarised... (Score:2)
"A really simple yet radical idea: break web pages down into sentences, and then have the browser walk through sentences and do useful sentence-level things.
Currently implemented features include sentence-level interfaces for TTS, translation, large-type display, and the funkiest of all, dynamic display of an image pulled off the web based on keywords extracted from each sentence -- hey, turn all your web pages into slide shows t
Pronoun extraction will work (Score:3, Interesting)
I did a survey of literature, coming at it from a layman developer's angle, and it seems the one area of natural language recognition (hence their name naturally open?) where computers are trustworthy and even exceed humans, is pronoun extraction. Not semantic recognition where meaning is understood, but just getting the who/where/what of proper nouns and being able to also link pronouns to them correctly. It's somewhere around 95% accurate and apparently better than a human volunteer in average accuracy, in one test.
This is accomplished not by dividing into sentences but looking at passages of multiple sentences. Perhaps theirs does some of this too, but even a very simple product searcher could just look for words not in its dictionary and google them. So it is not obvious what the merits of their approach are. Personally I'm interested in text-based interaction and news retrieval with open NLP tools.
What would be handy (Score:2)
As long as... (Score:2)
This would be great in the PDA world (Score:2)
Well, I think this would be a great feature for one of these PDAs that have 802.11b [palminfocenter.com] -- the small screens could use creative, alternative ways to browse the web.
wow (Score:2)
Re:wow (Score:2)
Re:wow (Score:2)
Re:wow (Score:2)
Re:wow (Score:2)
Sound Bits (Score:2)
First we had speeches. Then excerpts. Then sound bytes. Now sound nibbles? How soon to sound bits?
This is too bad. (Score:2)
In other words, if I put a recipe for chicken breasts on the Internet, this software will detect the word 'breasts' and display some pr0n next to it, whereupon the justice department will beset your door and drag you kicking and screaming to the slammer [baltimoresun.com]. Now go and TRY to prove that it was the computer's fault.
Oooooooooooooooooooooo
Re:Sentences???!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sentences???!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Buzz words (Score:3, Funny)
This is where I lost interest.
Re:What? (Score:2)
I take it you've never heard of Slashdot's editors?
Re:some key uses for sentence browsing (Score:2, Insightful)