Techdirt. Stories filed under "summaries" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "summaries"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 9 Jan 2013 17:00:00 PST DailyDirt: Adapting To A TL;DR Future Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101111/18110611828/dailydirt-adapting-to-tldr-future.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101111/18110611828/dailydirt-adapting-to-tldr-future.shtml
  • Clipped is a software tool that tries to extract key bits of information from long pieces of text. Tanay Tandon, a 15yo kid, created it and also filed a patent for his algorithm.... [url]
  • TLDR is a browser plug-in that tries to create short summaries for articles. These algorithms aren't perfect, but then again, neither is human comprehension. [url]
  • Another teenager wrote news-summarizing software and raised $1 million for it. It was originally called Trimmit, but now it's Summly -- and 16yo Nick D'Alosio is looking for some "serious scientists" to help him improve his algorithms with that VC funding. [url]
    • If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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    ]]>     urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101111/18110611828     Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:33:00 PST AP Summarizes Other Journalists' Article; Isn't That What The AP Says Violates The Law? Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100107/0251577648.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100107/0251577648.shtml Marcus Carab points us to a rather horrifying story about a family suing a funeral home after the funeral home put their grandmother's brain in a bag of personal effects and sent it to them. Yikes. But, ignore the story itself for a moment (if you can). What was interesting from our point of view was that the story was written by the Associated Press, and it's basically a rewrite of a story from The Albuquerque Journal. Here's how the AP points this out:
    The Albuquerque Journal reported on the lawsuit in a copyright story published Wednesday.
    Now, there are a few things odd about this. First... it's an odd phrase to use: "in a copyright story." Nearly all news stories are covered by copyright, so why even mention it?

    But what I find even more amusing is that if you look at the AP report, it's basically just a quick blurb rewrite of the Albuquerque Journal story. It's only 125 words, and just summarizes what the other paper wrote. Why is that amusing? Because that's exactly what the Associated Press has been claiming bloggers unfairly do to it -- insisting that others simply rewriting its stories in short blurbs are violating the "hot news" doctrine. Apparently, that doesn't apply when the AP does it itself?

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    ]]>     that's-odd http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100107/0251577648     Tue, 2 Jun 2009 15:12:00 PDT Could Your Website Be Liable For The Way Google's Algorithm Summarizes It? Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090602/0726155093.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090602/0726155093.shtml has been found liable for the way that Google summarized the content on the website. Google, of course, has algorithms that try to summarize the contents of a page in a snippet so that you know what's behind the link, and how it relates to the search that you do. As a part of that, it often will show parts of sentences connected by ellipses, and that's what happened here. The snippet on Google read:
    Complete name: Zwartepoorte Specialiteit: BMW...This company has been declared bankrupt, it has been acquired by the motordealer I have worked for Boat Rialto...
    This upset Zwartepoorte, an auto dealer, who felt that this summary falsely stated that it had gone bankrupt... so it sued the underlying site. It's quite surprising (on a number of different levels) that it didn't sue Google as well (or instead). However, the court actually agreed that this was the fault of the original website owner, and told Miljoenhuizen.nl to fix the website so that Google wouldn't summarize the site that way. It's hard to fathom how this could possibly be Miljoenhuizen.nl's fault, though apparently someone from Miljoenhuizen.nl suggested that it could control that in the courtroom -- which likely resulted in the judge's ruling.

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    ]]>     that-doesn't-seem-right http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090602/0726155093