From the Fingers of Henrik Flensborg Rants, Raves and Recommendations about marketing and health

RSS Summarizer

If you've got Linux, bash, perl with xml DOM support, festival, ots, sed, grep, lynx, and wget then you've got what it takes to automatically summarize RSS feeds.

Unfortunately I don't have access to all of the above, but I would really like to have it.

So, what's the difference between an RSS aggregator or feedreader and an RSS summarizer?

Well, with RSS feedreaders you get each feed item as a headline and possible with a short description/excerpt.

With RS3 the content of each RSS feed item is read and a summary is created (that's what the ots(Open Text Summarizer) is for) for you.

So what's the difference between a description and a summary?

Well, descriptions/excerpts are usually specifically chosen by whoever publishes the RSS feed or simply auto-generated from the first X characters of the content.

• Best case scenario: They tell you what the article is about because the author provides an accurate description.

Neutral case scenario: The auto-generated excerpt doesn't give any clues about what the feed item is really about.

• Bad case scenario: The auto-generated excerpt gives you the impression that the item is about something, while the content as a whole is about something else.
• Worst case scenario: A scrupulous marketer will deliberately create misleading descriptions to lure you into visiting his site to read the content. The content isn't there, but you'll find loads of porn, Viagra and gambling related ads, banners and endless pop-ups - plus maybe even a few drive-by-downloads to put your computer at risk

RS3 on the other hand will retrieve all the text for you and create a summary based on the entire text.

With a more full summary you can make better judgement about which articles you want to read in full, and which you don't need to read because either the article is not interesting for you or the summary is sufficient information for you on the subject.

Now, it's not everybody that has webservers equipped with Linux, bash, perl with xml DOM support, festival, ots, sed, grep, lynx, and wget at their disposal, so it would be nice if a company such as Copernic would build an RSS summarizer into their already great Copernic Summarizer