Very cool – Spritz

I suspect this is a bit more revolutionary than it first appears. Go try it.

Learning

Various changes have occurred in my business life and, for the first time in months, I have a bit of time and a solid reason to start researching ideas I had over a year ago.

The most significant of these is the automatic summarization of text.

If the 90’s were the decade of “search” and the noughts the decade of “social” the question arises what the “teens” may be about. Oddly, both search and social have pretty much bumped up against their practical limits. I can find out what is on the web using Google, if I care, I can find out what people I have a vague connection to think of stuff on the net using “Facebook/Twitter/Linked-In/Reddit….” But who has the time?

With huge amounts of information and opinion to hand, the editorial/curatorial function is, I think, about to become important. For that to happen there has to be an efficient way of finding, storing and summarizing information so that the editor/curator has the building blocks.

Algorithmic publishing is in its infancy but there is a pretty good chance that a lot of what you are going to be reading will be published, pretty much on a custom basis, for people very much like you. For factual material I think this may be very important; for opinion and commentary I think it likely to be destructive as people will be able to stay cocooned.

No matter what, the actual process is fascinating.