Today I’m excited to announce that Topicmarks has been acquired by social discovery leader Tagged.

The Topicmarks team has had a busy 2011, launching and building out a new product to help you quickly digest long-form content. We’ve achieved some major milestones along the way, including integration with Evernote and Google Docs, and we remain as passionate as ever about helping users understand their news, reports and more in a fast and digital way.

As we’ve developed the technology behind Topicmarks, we’ve learned a lot about matching people with information, which makes us a perfect fit for Tagged as the site grows its capabilities around meeting new people online. Topicmarks will continue to operate as its own site for the foreseeable future.

A big thanks to our users, advisors, investors, family and friends for your continued support! We wouldn’t be here without you!

We have exciting news.  Topicmarks is now connected to Google Docs!

The integration works just like our connection to Evernote.  Simply authorize Topicmarks to connect to your Google Docs account and we’ll take care of the rest.  Every document that you add to your Google Docs account will be automatically linked to your Topicmarks account.  You can get all the docs you’re creating and sharing with your friends instantaneously summarized and indexed across your repository – even across all your repositories.

Please follow up with us and let us know what you think!  What do you think should be the next repository that we connect?

As you probably have noticed, we have also updated our repository and document navigation bar on the left side of the screen to be easier to navigate.  It also gives you an instant view of how many documents you have in each of your repositories.  It’s pretty cool.

We hope your week is going well and you’ve been enjoying Topicmarks’ ability to help you quickly and accurately view your documents and news articles at a glance.  Please hit us up at support@topicmarks.com with any questions or comments you may have.  We’re here to make your life easier.

This weekend is Labor Day Weekend in the US, and in honor of that, Topicmarks is celebrating the ways in which we’re helping workers save time and be more productive.  You have a lot of information flowing through your life on a daily basis – why not let Topicmarks lend you a hand?  You deserve it.

During the month of August, Topicmarks processed nearly 1 million documents for our new and existing users who are taking advantage of connecting their Evernote and Google Reader accounts.  Topicmarks is now being used in 151 different countries and by users who speak 62 different languages.  We’re thrilled!  After native English speakers, Spanish speakers and German speakers are the next biggest users of Topicmarks.  Gracias und Dankeschön, friends!

In other news, we’ve been testing our connection to Google Docs internally and it’s working well.  We’re thinking that we’re going to turning on this functionality publically sometime next week.  We’re also releasing an improved source navigation sidebar (the one you see on the left hand side of the website) that will make Topicmarks easier to navigate.  What’s more, you can now delete your Topicmarks account in the “my account” section, and you’ll soon be able to unhook your feeds and even delete certain files and news articles from your Topicmarks account.  Just a reminder, your news articles from Google Reader will automatically be purged after 48 hours.

Finally, if you haven’t tried clipping a Topicmarks doc to Evernote, try it out.  This is the best way to save summaries of your news articles that are rotating through your Topicmarks account.  Trust us – Evernote is the best place to save them!  We love Evernote and we think you should too.

Happy Labor Day and stay safe on those roads.  We’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready to start being productive again.

It’s been a few days since the Evernote Trunk Conference and we’re all still buzzing from the energy and enthusiasm of all the participants.  There were a lot of great speakers and app companies at the event.  You can learn more here.  As of last Thursday, Topicmarks has been featured in the New + Noteworthy section of the Evernote Trunk and we’re having a lot of fun watching the number of new users climb every day.

Since appearing on the trunk, Topicmarks has processed over 300,000 new documents and 18,000+ news streams.  We’re really cranking through some documents!  We’ve come a long way since we used to summarize uploads one by one.

Unfortunately, this sharp increase in signups caused a fairly significant backlog in processing items.  We’ve responded by adding a lot more capacity to deal with the increase in user demand and we’re now all caught up with our backlog of new Evernote accounts.  We greatly apologize for any long delay this may have caused you in syncing your Evernote account.

On a side note, we’ve seen a lot of pictures and non-text notes pass through our system.  We’d just like to remind our users that Topicmarks only processes text (or words) in English, and not images or foreign languages sources.  Additionally, some PDF documents may have fonts that are not recognized by our text extractor.  If you’d like for us to look into why your note was not processed, please send it to us and we’ll look into it right away.

We’re excited that the new Topicmarks is becoming such a success.  Please email us back with any and all suggestions you may have to how we can improve.  We’ve only done a good job if you are happy!

New update – Topicmarks is excited to announce the ability to clip your Topicmarks files directly to Evernote!  Now, in addition to syncing your existing Evernote notes in Topicmarks, you can clip any Topicmarks summary and concept map back into Evernote with one simple click.  We’re big fans of Evernote as the perfect way to collect all of your memories, and this now includes your Topicmarks summaries from your favorite blogs or news articles, with links back to the original source.

Topicmarks is proud to include this seamless integration with Evernote as part of its growing mission of being the essential dashboard for your personal cloud.  In addition to connecting with Google Reader and Evernote, Topicmarks will soon connect with your Dropbox and Box.net accounts, with many more to come.

You can find Topicmarks today at the Evernote Trunk Conference.  Feel free to grab one of us if you have any questions.  Remember, if you get a business card from a Topicmarker today, it’s good for a free drink.

Things have been quiet at Topicmarks for the last couple of months, as a number of you have noticed.  Don’t worry, we didn’t get stranded on an island in the South Pacific – we’ve been hunkered down in our SF office working on bringing you the next generation of Topicmarks.

We’ve been refining our algorithms and redesigning the website to focus on bringing in your documents from a variety of sources.  In addition to uploading files from your computer and cutting and pasting web links (which you can still do), you can now upload and sync all your files directly from document repositories like Evernote, with others soon to follow.  What’s more, you can now put your news feeds from Google Reader directly into Topicmarks so all your news stories (no matter how long  – I’m looking at you, New Yorker) can be cut down to the 10 most important sentences.  If you want to read the full article, which I frequently do, you can simply click on the title to go to the original source.  Think of Topicmarks as a way to power through your articles so you can find the ones that you really want to spend time reading – or just enjoy the summaries.

Check out screen shots here:

With Topicmarks’ ability to identify key points in each document, we can now connect all of your documents together through their key concepts.  Trust me, it’s really cool.  To get started, click on an item in your Topicmarks list and select one of the key concepts that interests you in the concept cloud.  You’ll instantly see your list of items in the left hand column filtered on that concept.  For example, if you click on “planet of the apes” link below, you’ll find 17 items that include that concept.  This is a great way to explore all of the news stories and files in your Topicmarks – all without having to know ahead of time what’s in them.

Let us know what you think!

Drop box just hit 25 million (up from 4 million just 15 months ago) users and likely to only keep growing.  Mozy is at it’s heals and many more and entering this crowded room.  Over at Topicmarks this is cause for some serious excitement. Personal cloud storage is here to stay and  as endless gigabytes pile up on servers the need for a quick way to consume and understanding this wall of information will naturally follow.

Dropbox is in incredible product, we are big fans.  We are also excited to be a part of the cloud ecosystem (Lest we fail to mention Box.net and Mozy) and to be building a solution that solve such a fundamental problem.  Finding meaning and context in personal data and displaying it in simple concise form will be essental in this new world.  Cloud drives are filling up with personal content and datasets will inevitably become larger, more diverse,  and more interconnected. This could mean a world of more complexity but to us this just means more opportunity to discover new things; new articles to read, better news to keep you informed, better facts to use in your life with no loss of convenience or simplicity.

In business, reading through lots of documents to look for a few points is just a fact of life.  There’s allot of business information out there (both internal and external) and the right facts to make critical decisions are tantalizing close. The question is where to find them? Lawyers know this game very well.  Facts from past cases are incredibly important in future rulings and their discovery is one of the chief tasks of case preparation.  At one time this task was bain of entry level lawyer but now discovery is done increasingly by machines and NLP legal systems.  Reading leegalees, while incredibly difficult for the non-lawyers among us, is a task computers do fair well at (It has a standard style and vocabulary).

Topicmarks takes this idea to the next level by creating discovery for all document types. With cloud storage, business record keeping has exploded and  finding facts that lead to business insight has become increasingly daunting.  Organizations know their intelligence is only as good as the research and information they create, save and retrieve precisely when they need it.

What Topicmarks creates is the equivalent of an army of secretaries and analysts to pull out the important facts from your documents in real time.  The competitive advantage for researchers with an accurate machine reading tool is astounding.  It  turns one analyst or one decision maker into a fact finding army and removes the document overload from the equation. The future of the cloud is a world of understanding in the face of mountains of information.