Posts Tagged ‘topicmarks’
October 20th, 2010
Some users try out Topicmarks with texts that are too short to summarize. This is why we now have a new error message advising people to try Topicmarks with larger texts.
Topicmarks is designed to condense long texts into short summaries of 3-50 sentences. When your text is already 10 sentences or less, there is nothing for us to condense. To see the full power of Topicmarks, please try a text of at least a few pages.
NB Topicmarks cannot (yet) paraphrase text (put the same meaning in different words). If this is what you are looking for, you may want to try http://translate.google.com to translate your text into a foreign language and back.
Tags: different words, error message, few page, full power, Google, long texts, new error message, nothing, paraphrase, paraphrase text, please, same meaning, sentences, sforeign language, short summaries, texts, topicmarks, users
Posted in Innovation of the week: | No Comments »
October 18th, 2010
JJ is a student from Hong Kong who is a big fan of Topicmarks:
“I LOVE topicmarks! It does a great service by capturing most key points in the summary and then making them easy to find with the index function. [...] Many thanks for a great product!”
JJ also asks if Topicmarks results are downloadable. For now, most users just copy-paste our summaries to their email or word processing applictions but we’ll consider making them downloadable in a future version.
Tags: downloadable, fan, future, Hong Kong, key points, love, product, service, student, summary, topicmarks, version
Posted in User feedback of the week: | No Comments »
October 17th, 2010
Topicmarks just added a brand new overview tab to its text knodes. The tab will give single glance access to all views of a text. The new tab will be the first users see.
Since the beta launch in March, Topicmarks has helped readers to grasp texts at a glance through a summary, a list of facts, a keyword cloud and a book index format. But you still had to cycle through the tabs to review all persectives and there was no easy way to compare two views with each other.
The new overview tab solves this problem. As the first tab you see for every new text knode, the overview tab gives you the default summary, the top facts, the top keywords and an index view all at a single glance. Each section contains a link to the corresponding tab, where you can then play with e.g. the length of the summary or the coverage of the index.
We’ve already noticed that the overview tab gives people even better insights into the text knodes they create, and we hope it will point more users to the power of the different views available on the other tabs.
Tags: click, cycle, default, facts view, feature, glance, index view, overview tab, quick, summarization, summary view, topicmarks, understand
Posted in Innovation of the week: | No Comments »
September 20th, 2010
Emails contains only standard summary
Are you reading Topicmarks summaries in your email? Then you may be missing out on some advanced features. The summary in your email is just a starting point; click on the link and you can customize the summary in any way you like.
Use the website to change length and perspective
The link from the email brings you the same summary on your Topicmarks Document Dashboard:
- Use the slider to shorten or lengthen the summary to anywhere between 3 and 50 sentences.
- Click on any sentence to see it in its original context, for example if you want to check if an author really meant that sentence seriously.
-
Enter any word in the search box to generate a summary with a particular perspective on your search term.
Dynamic overview of most important sentences
Reviewing summaries in your email is fine when you just want to get a quick overview. But for deeper understanding, play around with the slider and the search box; it’s like hearing views on the same text from a large number of people.
Tags: advanced features, click, dashboard, document, dynamic, email, ereviewing summaries, example, large number, link, original context, particular perspective, perspectiv, same summary, search box, search term, sentences, slider, standard summary, starting point, topicmarks, topicmarks summaries
Posted in User question of the week: | 1 Comment »
September 17th, 2010
Topicmarks serves many grad students who couldn’t imagine writing their papers without it. Mark writes:
“I love this online application . . . What more could a grad student want. It condenses, examines, extracts, combines, connects and summarizes. Anybody that has been to grad school knows scoring over literally hundreds of journal articles preparing for a paper takes can be a daunting task. Wow—what a time saver. A great product!”
We are proud to help the world’s grad students to produce better papers, and the world’s research assistants to read and evaluate these papers even faster. If you’re doing any kind of research, make sure you let Topicmarks help you with the heavy lifting. So that you can focus on what humans do best: creating new insights and conveying them convincingly!
Tags: anybody, daunting task, grad school, grad student, grad students, great product, heavy lifting, hundreds, journal articles, kind, new insights, online application, papers, research assistants, topicmarks, what time, world grad students, world research assistants, wow
Posted in User feedback of the week: | No Comments »
September 5th, 2010
Mere triage does not stem the flow
GMail promises that its recently launched Priority Inbox will help you tackle information overload. But sorting messages by priority does not make them go away—putting the juiciest pancake on top does not make the stack any lower!
Improve the speed of reading and processing
Really dealing with information overload means processing emails more efficiently. It means skimming emails much faster, and confidently discarding unimportant messages altogether. This is where Topicmarks can help.
Mail-in to Topicmarks and you only ever read a summary
Just forward any unimportant message from your inbox to your Topicmarks mail-in address, and Topicmarks sends you back a quick summary. Confidently skim the summaries and pick the few messages you really have to read. Safely discard all the rest—if you ever need them again, they are safely stored in your Topicmarks brain forever.
Tags: brain, discarding, email overload, flow, gmail, information overload, mail-in, messages, pancake, priority inbox, quick summary, safe, sorting, stack, top, topicmarks, triage, unimportant
Posted in Information overload: | No Comments »
September 2nd, 2010
Jijin from China found that Topicmarks produces better summaries than any of his classmates.
“I was very happy to receive this summary. My teacher tells me that among all the students, my summary is the best one.”
It is great to see that Topicmarks is helping so many students in the classroom. If even teachers grade Topicmarks summaries better, why would anyone still bother to skim a document without it?
Tags: anyone, china, classmates, classroom, document, grade, jijin, students, summaries, summary, teachers, topicmarks
Posted in User feedback of the week: | No Comments »
August 30th, 2010
This week’s Weekly Topicmarks update is the first edition of a new, much more personalized format. For the first time, it reveals your Brain expanding live.
Topicmarks Weekly Update Entirely Renewed
Before, Topicmarks sent you regularly sent updates and tips in one-size-fits-all articles. Now we also want to show you how your “Topicmarks brain” is learning and evolving. This week’s update is the first to integrate those amazing new features.
Reveals Your Brain, Your Texts, Your Facts, Your Knowledge
As you can see in this week’s update, every update now contains an amazing dynamic overview of all the concepts and keywords foremost in your “Topicmarks brain”. You can see where your knowledge is growing most strongly, and discover topics that are gradually entering your brain. There is also an overview of the latest texts you uploaded, statistics of how many facts you have gathered, and much easier ways to retrieve your password or update your profile.
Use Facebook to Let Us Know What You Think
Thousands of users are helping to make Topicmarks a better service every day, and we’re also looking forward to your comments on this fantastic new update. Do you like the new features of the update? Is it helping you to see facts in a new format, and find new topics of interest?
Tags: amazing, articles, awesome, brain, day, dynamic, entirely renewed, expanding, facebook page, first edition, new, new format, one-size-fits-all, overview, statistics, texts, thousands, topicmarks, update, updates, users, ways, week, weekly
Posted in Innovation of the week: | No Comments »
August 25th, 2010
Topicmarks users are uploading so many different texts that some are bound to stretch the limits. One thing that we definitely didn’t design Topicmarks for is understanding poetry.
High school students with poetry assignments
Every now and then, somebody sends a poem through Topicmarks expecting to find its meaning. We found that most of these users are high school students with an assignment to interpret a poem. We’re very flattered to see students trust Topicmarks so much!
Topicmarks doesn’t work well with short texts or fiction
Unfortunately, we designed our technology particularly for long and dense non-fiction texts. Summarizing fiction is a completely different challenge, since a good abstract tries to summarize the deeper meaning of the author. Poems are both full of double meaning and too short to summarize.
The secret with poetry is that you can’t go wrong
If you’re a student, use Topicmarks for all text books and papers, for notes and syllabuses, for famous authors and your own writing. But here’s a tip for poetry: since it’s about feelings, there is never a wrong answer. So let go of computer analytics, and just write down what you feel when you read the poem. This is all your teacher really wants, and guys, you’ll impress the girls with it too!
Tags: books, challenge, computer analytics, different texts, double meaning, famous authors, feelings, fiction, girls, high school students, notes, papers, poem, poems, poetry, somebody, summarizing, syllabus, Technology, topicmarks, trust, understanding
Posted in Understanding Topicmarks: | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
Sometimes Topicmarks cannot read the file you tried to upload, and therefore cannot process it. The error message will tell you what is wrong with your document, e.g.
Name: myfilename.pdf
URL: file://myfilename.pdf
Processing error: Resource contains no text available for processing.
This error, typically occurring with PDF files, means that the PDF only contains images of text, not computer-readable text.
The solution is to have it “recognise” the text first with OCR (optical character recognition), by using any OCR software or by uploading it to web-based solutions like Evernote.
Tags: character recognition, clue, computer-readable text, document, editable, error message, evernote, images, ocr software, optical character recognition, pdf files, processing, readable, resource, scanned, scanner, searchable, short error message, topicmarks, web-based solutions
Posted in Frequently Asked Questions | No Comments »
