John Johnson writes:
Let’s face it, there is a lot of content on the web, and one thing I hate worse is reading halfway through an article and realizing that the title and first paragraph indicate little about the rest of the article. In effect, I check out the quick content first (usually after a link), and am disappointed.
My strategy now is to use automatic summaries, which are now a lot more accessible than they used to be. The algorithm has been around since 1958 (!) by H. P. Luhn and is described in books such as Mining the Social Web by Matthew Russell (where a Python implementation is given). With a little work, you can create a program that scrapes text from a blog, provides short and long summaries, and links to the original post, and packages it up in a neat HTML page.
Or you can use the cute interface in Safari, if you care to switch.
The woes of ambiguity!
I jumped to John’s post thinking it had some clever way to read math faster. 😉 Some of the articles I am reading take a lot longer than others. I have one on homology that I am just getting comfortable enough with to post about it.
Any reading assistant tools that you would care to recommend?
Of particular interest would be software that I could feed a list of URLs that resolve to PDFs files (possibly with authentication although I could login to start it off) and it produces a single HTML page summary.