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Software idea for speed reading/skimming text by color-coding important keywords

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David.P:
Hi forum,

I read a LOT on the Internet every day -- like blogs, news, forums etc.

Very often however, I'd simply like to get the basic idea of the contents e.g. of a (long) blog or news text, but can't be bothered to read my way through the entire length of it in the first place.

Therefore I wish there was a software (or online service) that could do the following:

[*]1)   Rank and list the most frequently used keywords in any (selected) amount of text.
[*]2)   Remove small and common words from the ranking/list, and only keep like a dozen important keywords from the text.
[*]3)   Finally, apply different text highlighter colors to the respective occurrences of those text keywords.

Almost all of this already can be done semi-manually by using Wordcounter, Firefox and Googlebar Lite.

Wordcounter does 1) and 2):


and Googlebar Lite:


does 3):


Here's an example of what an article looks like with the highlights applied.

Although that might be a bit too much color (maybe like 5 to 7 colors and respective keywords would be good for a start), I am quite convinced that this would be a great way of quickly ploughing through the masses of text that one comes across during a typical day, and where it would be nice to get a basic idea of it's contents first -- before maybe going through some of it in somewhat more depth.

Well anyway, it would be GREAT if this idea could be made into a Firefox extension (or something) that automatically applies steps 1) through 3) to any amount of text that for example has been selected on a web page....

Thanks heaps already for comments or further ideas that anyone might have regarding this idea,

Cheers David.P

mouser:
seems like a great idea to me.. and i can see just as interesting would be to let user define their own custom word sets that list certain words that should shown in certain colors.. would be great for people who are specialists looking for certain things.  nice if you could switch wordsets depending on your task.

David.P:
Thanks mouser, for your approval as well as your idea about custom word sets for specialist research and the like.

Awww I'm actually already dreaming about a toolbar button in Firefox that simply applies keyword highlighting automatically to every web page that I visit...! This would be such an INCREDIBLE time saver for me...

Anyone....? As for me, I'll donate in the double-digit range for a working solution....

Probably, for a robust solution and in order to automatically identify important keywords (and leave out most general, common words) it would be good to cross-check the pages' keywords against a general language word frequency list, and only highlight those frequent keywords on the page that are LESS frequent on a general scale (and therefore potentially MORE important for the currently displayed text).

Cheers David.P

mouser:
I think the easiest thing would be to separate the task of *AUTOMATICALLY* determining what words to highlight using frequency analysis, from the task of actually highlighting/coloring words based on manually configured wordlists.

Then a separate tool can be used to create wordlists based on frequency counting, etc.  Lot's of tools for that, and people can share their lists, etc., i don't see too much value trying to build this functionality into the addon itself.  Just have it let the user create and switch between WordColorSets that specify which words should be shown in which colors.

I think it's a great idea, and would make a terrific NANY 2011 project for someone looking for an idea and willing to make a FireFox plugin.

David.P:
Mouser, thank you! Maybe this thread should be moved to the NANY section then?

For me personally, I think it would be important to have frequency counting and word list creation done automatically somehow (could be done by a separate tool of course or by an online service etc., you name it). This is because I think there would be not many cases where a "static" or "custom" word list would be the same even for only as little as two different web pages, blog lines or the like.

Cheers David.P

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