Semantic Text Technology

We knew it was only a matter of time. As Chris Anderson said, we live in a world of infinite content, and finite time. Anything that can help us sift through the former and add more to the latter is going to be very well received.

Last week Mashable ran a story on Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.com, who is leading a round of investment in TopicMarks, a fascinating startup which has developed a semantic text technology that can analyze content (text) and extract the most important information, effectively generating a Cliffs Notes summary of everything you need to know from any document. Where was this when I was in school?

While the technology is still very new, one can't help but wonder if this type of capability is the next big thing. With so much information available to us and only so much time in the day, anything that can help us digest it more efficiently  is going to be a welcome addition.

I was brainstorming with my friend the other day on what the next "big thing" might be. When it comes to communication, I don't know how much more connected we can be, short of psychic messages. Since we can pretty much obtain content whenever we want, perhaps the next big paradigm shift may be in how we consume our content. Using Semantic Text Technology we might be able to weed through nonessential items and get to the meat of what we are after, much faster. And that of course would net us that one precious resource that is so very finite. Time.

Too bad it's not mainstream yet, you could have used it to avoid reading this entire post.

Here is a link to the full Mashable Article

 

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