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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."
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...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.
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 ---
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."
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!
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.
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.
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
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.