Enabling content shortening

Put together on October 23, 2009 11:38 am by Dimitris
5 Comments

[ TALL & short ]
Image by CCiYn via Flickr

In my previous post I wrote about how information can be broken down to its components. Following that, these components can be summarised and the summaries combined again to create a shorter and perhaps easier to digest and spread piece of information.

So, if this ‘analysis, summary and combination’ approach is a good idea, what would be the best way to implement it on existing bodies of information – e.g. blog posts, news articles and other passages on the web?

Most probably a number of methods can be combined. For example, the author of the text can do this at the time of writing to produce a shorter version of it. In some cases it’s already happening in some way or another: Wordpress blogs allow for filling in an ‘Excerpt’ field – ‘optional hand-crafted summaries of your content that can be used in your theme’, CNN articles have 3-5 bullet points summary of the facts of some articles and I bet there are other examples out there.

In addition to this, this process can be crowdsourced. Technically, this is as simple as enabling your site to receive comments – only instead of comments users would leave summaries. And instead of writing them e.g. at the end of a blog post, an icon at the start of the paragraph can be clicked to leave a summary of the paragraph that follows. The summary could then appear as a permanent addition to the post (after it has been moderated, of course).

In a sense that’s an even better approach than letting authors do it themselves since the ‘crowds’ will introduce a selection criterion: only the most worthy texts will be provided with a more concise version. (Of course, there’s nothing stopping the actual author from providing a summary himself at a later time).

Such crowdsourcing is already happening using various web-annotation services (mostly for commenting or editing purposes e.g. GooseGrade) or can be achieved by adapting online translation services (e.g. Transifex). The list of similar services is quite long if one looks into it.

Such services however are not made specifically for the purpose of shortening, promoting and adding meaning in this way to an existing passage, so perhaps a more specific service could be created to cover this particular niche (especially as the business of providing meaning becomes more relevant as Semantic Web technologies mature).

tags: analysis, idea, product

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Comments

5 Responses to “Enabling content shortening”

  1. vrypan on October 23rd, 2009 4:41 pm

    Or, use Google Reader’s “share with note” notes :-)

  2. Dimitris on October 23rd, 2009 4:58 pm

    Thanks for the comment vrypan. That sure is an option but whoever accesses the site through means other than Google Reader (e.g. twitter, other RSS reader, etc) misses that added content (and value). It’s way better if the short version stays in the website it refers to. Or even better (?), writing a summary could optionally initiate an update of the RSS feed.

  3. vrypan on October 25th, 2009 9:58 am

    I meant one could write a program to find the Google Reader notes and bring them back to your site automatically.

  4. Dimitris on October 26th, 2009 12:36 am

    Yes, Google Reader is a good place to start as lots of people use it, it is based on ‘the real web’ (i.e. is not inside a walled-garden) and it should be easy to process the ’shared notes’ it offers. Other services may be possible or useful to add after that.

  5. Question search engine | terrainnova.org on October 29th, 2009 12:17 pm

    [...] also be integrated quite well with the ‘paragraph summary’ platform I described in this post) tags: idea, [...]

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