Slashdot Mirror
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."
If you really want to browse the web, try this: The world's best Surf Engine IconSurf.com, where you surf the web using website icons. When you want to explore instead of doing targeted searches or visiting the same old sites, this is the way to do it. Shameless plug of my new toy, but it's pretty revolutionary as well. I'd appreciate any feedback, as the site is just a little over 1 week old.
...if people writing Web pages actually used sentences.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
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
Because as this shows, breaking coherent paragraphs up into sentences and further mashing them into keywords, makes works far more accesible.
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I do not support the idea of ad-fetching based on a per-sentence reasoning, because it means more ads and interruptions (browser interstitials, really). It's totally inefficient for end users and it only gives the advertisers a hard-on because they get to really psychologically assault surfers (which is a huge turn on to advertisers because they feel like they are super-human if they can fuck with our heads... it's fucking sick if you ask me). I prefer Slashdot's method of bonus features that subscribers can get by chipping in. Why can't advertisers come up with better concepts for selling their product (perhaps by word of mouth because it's a good product, not because we're always tripping over an ad about it).
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.
Agghk! Black-flagged on the opening lap!
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Is it just me, or did all that make no sense what -so-ever?
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
I have no idea what you mean. If someone takes the time to put the information online, we shoudl take the time to read it.
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
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
Ah yes, that beautiful word "paradigm shift." I forget the exact wording, but the general quote goes something along the lines of "any time you hear that phrase, smile and nod while slowly backing away."
Depends upon your browser. In IE 6 most load. Mozilla, Firebird and Opera virtually all load. The icons are actual icons, so some browsers do not support them. You're probably only seeing the icons that happen to be gifs or jpegs.
That's a good idea. I'm going to make an addon for IE that does spell checking and auto-fixing. Now if we can just get the spelling and grammar trolls to use it so we don't have to listen to them grumble.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
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?
Ever see dashboard? It takes information gathered during IRC, IM, web browsing, e-mail, and more, does a lot of backend cluepacket mojo, and returns a lot of useful information while you work. If "bug 1565" comes up during your work, it'll fetch information in dashboard about the bug without needing you to click on a bug link. Microsoft is working on the same thing, called "implicit query" or some such. Look at the Windows Longhorn screenshots so far... It looks like they are taking the classic IE information sidebar and altering it to work in this way.
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.
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 the Semantic Web? Have they gone through the process of presenting this as a new standard or improving upon a standard? I doubt it.
Good luck with writing a spelling and grammar fixer which English-speaking people from both sides of the Atlantic are happy to use.
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.
This is where I lost interest.
Here is an interesting little tool for converting from sentences to images...Symbolify..it uses Google's image search.
here is one i have just done
http://homepage.mac.com/trash80/misc/info.png
I wish. However, I believe Thomas Kuhn and "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" far precedes, and will far outlast the .com bubble (first published 1962).
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.
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.
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 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.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
"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.
A sentence is basically a linear construct. But the way our brain processes a sentence is non-linear. We skip forward, we refer back. We process the sentence in this "looping" fashion until we comprehend it (or not, sometimes we just read it in linear fashion and move on to the next sentence in hopes that it will provide more context for us).
Read any good sonnets lately?
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.comSurprise, Surprise... the same guy.
He could have told us in the post that he wrote the thing.
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?
I don't know what these guys are doing, the blurb on their site is funny but I don't want an IE plugin. However, it is possible they are a couple computational linguistics grads..
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.
I would look at the following technologies:
WordNet is well known although not that powerfull.
Common sense is really a beta but still its a big database.
Cyc 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.