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Browsing the Web, One Sentence at a Time
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."
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.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
out of a non-semantic web. As units of language, sentences are still context sensitive, so this will very quickly get mired in throwing up offensive and inapropriate results. Imagine an article 'Man driven to suicide by music of Justin Timberlake' followd by 'Buy Justin Timberlake CDs on Amazon'.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
1)dynamic display of an image pulled off the web based on keywords
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.
Reality is in the mind of the beholder - me 1996
Sweet Zombie Jesus, I did not spend my time turning off animated gifs, turning off Flash, stopping those stupid "download this plugin" buttons from popping up, using Google instead of Antarti.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?
Carousel is a lie!
Nope, stupid buzzwords never die.
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 hodgepodge of BBS's and proprietary online services. Everything else, as interesting (or not) as it may be, is just incremental change. And there's nothing wrong with that, because most of the time, incremental change is how things gets done. But everyone wants to be the guy who invented the Next Big Thing, not the guy who made last year's NBT a little bit better.
It occurs to me that I may soon be adding a fourth to my list -- the fall of proprietary software and the rise of F/OSS -- but it's too early to tell how that one will shake out.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm sorry, but I don't download somthing that I can't see. I mean, at least some screen shots or a demo of how it will work. How can you trust this?
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!"
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
Why do I get the feeling that this turns rich web pages into bit-size powerpoint bullets? (Confession, I have no windows machines so have no way of testing this thing). Maybe they will create a version that converts webpages into Flash animations -- showing ... you ... one ... word ... at ... a .... time.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
So it can highlight sentences of a webpage at a time and display them as large type. I must admit I am rather underwhelmed by this paradigm shift.
Come on. This is *Stupid. This is goofy-stupid. This is dumber than "push technology" was.
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 . . "
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
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.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Their web site says, "Display the best on-line shopping sites for items mentioned in each sentence."
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 translation...
I never cease to be amazed at users' appreciation for relatively useless software. *cough*GATOR*cough*
In Soviet Redmond, software programs you!
The information is supposed to be viewed at a glance, off to the side, and potentially useful. It's not popping up on top of your work saying "This bug is blah blah blah".
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.
"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.
I don't get it. I copy and paste sentences into Google all the time, either to find out if something's been plagiarized or to show someone that the garbage they just sent me is yet another urban legend or internet scam. If you're using Opera (or IE with a Google toolbar, I suppose, or whatever cool new search thing is used in Mozilla), you can do it in two moves and it opens in a new tab. What am I missing here? Besides a new way for the marketing trolls to try to grab my eyeballs?