Tales from the Techside

RSSBrief is a new tool that promises to summarize the high points of blog articles automagically. To get started you simply enter the news feed you want summarized and RSSBrief generates a short summary of what was covered in each article in that feed. Each summary contains a few lines of text, a word count, and a direct link to the article.

Currently the service is in early Alpha so hopefully in later releases there will be a way to define multiple feeds (say my OPML) and summarize them as an aggregated superfeed all from one interface would be really great. It is my experience that often you can read a couple of lines of an article and get the main idea and from there decide to read the rest of the article.

On the downside you have to summarize each feed singularly but you can subscribe to the summarized feed which is pretty nice. As to actually summarizing articles it seems to do a fair job at that, below are some example summaries of articles from Tales from the Techside.

Yahoo MapMixer lets you Mashup Maps
344 words : Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:13 PM EDT

Yahoo’s new MapMixer tools enables you to combine two different maps together and share the result as a grouped map… With MapMixer, you could easily combine property maps, Thomas brother maps, housing statistics for an area or a map showing all the rest …

SEO & SEM
1314 words : Thu Sep 13, 2007 01:42 AM EDT

In reality it is an important question to ask yourself as you examine your online footprint… I will deal with SEO in this segment, and hope to post the second portion shortly… Since the inception of the online search, the goal has always been to be th …

The Conversation Continues’.
411 words : Thu Sep 13, 2007 01:32 AM EDT

Jim Duncan over at the RealCentralVa blog has written a post that follows thread of conversation that Michael over FBS Blog began, Brian at Geekestate continued… The quote that grabbed my attention in Jim Duncan’s post was ‘ Yet consumers don’t want to …

Syndication of Listings: How it Should Work
1157 words : Tue Sep 11, 2007 10:49 PM EDT

Photo from Flickr A few days ago Brian Wilson over at the Geek Estate Blog posted an excellent article about Listing Syndication, this prompted me to write a post about Data Standardization because in my crazy way of viewing the universe they are interrel …

On my Radar: Jott
577 words : Tue Sep 11, 2007 02:04 AM EDT

Jott is an interesting technology that will transcribe your voice to text while there are some pretty cool uses for this technology such as setting appointment reminders, or sending your self virtual sticky notes… What really caught my attention is that …

If you want to see how the site summary looks click here to view it.

Extra Tip: you can do much the same thing in Word if you have a long document you need to summarize or if you need to generate an executive summary or abstract. To AutoSummarize a document in word simply follow the steps below.

1. Open the document that you want to summarize.
2. Choose AutoSummarize from the Tools menu.
3. When the AutoSummarize window opens, select the type of summary that you want to apply. You can choose to highlight key points, insert an executive summary or abstract at the top of the document, create a new document, or hide everything but the summary.

Note: As with most things automagical you will need to review the generated summary to make sure it makes sense and also captures the information you want to present, but it can easily save you 10 to 15 minutes especially if adding the executive summary or key points is a last minute request.

Mark Flavin

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