Sometimes web pages offer that many information on a specific topic, that it would take half an hour or more to read through all the available textual information. That’s fine if you got the time for that, not so if you are in a hurry and only need the essentials, or a summary, of what is being said in the article.
That’s where the Firefox add-on WikiSeer Keynote helps the reader. The add-on basically creates a summary of the text on a given web page, and displays it to the reader. The developers claim that the text gets reduced by up to 99%, which is a lot. A more realistic figure is probably 75%, which still saves a lot of time, if the quality of the summary is high enough.
keynotes
The add-on offers two operation modes. In the first mode, the user needs to right-click the icon in the status bar and select view page keynotes from the menu to generate a summary of the current page.
The summary is displayed in a popup overlay that disappears if the user clicks outside of the popup area. The summary contains various options to interact, including adding a rating, leaving a comment and sharing it by email, Twitter or Facebook.
The second option can be enabled by left-clicking on the status bar icon. This enables link mode, which can then generate summaries of links on that page as well. Just hovering over a link displays a summary of the linked page on the active page, so that it is not necessary to follow the link to read that page’s contents.
The add-on offers a history that can be accessed from the right-click context menu as well. The history displays the most recent keynotes that have been created by the add-on.
About the quality; That largely depends on the page’s contents. It ranges from being a solid summary to a summary that is hard to read and not really helpful at all. There is no option to increase the amount of words used in the summary, which is something that the developer’s should consider adding, to improve the quality of the summary.
WikiSeer Keynotes is available for the Firefox web browser.
Update: WikiSeer Keynotes has been removed from the Firefox add-on repository by its developer. I’m not aware of any add-on alternatives. A solid online service is Topicmarks which can summarize documents.
Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter.Related Articles:
Web Page Thumbnails, Create, Archive Web Page ScreenshotsHow To Add An RSS Feed To A Facebook Page, Ghacks Fan Page Coming Up
Watch Cebit Keynotes And Panels Live
Desktop, Create Custom New Tab Page In Firefox
Web Page Thumbnails, Create Website Screenshots