What's Tonight's Topic?

Tonight's post would not have been possible without Shannon Miller's (@shannonmmiller) tweet this morning.  That's how I discovered Topicmarks.  I haven't had a lot of time to examine the application, but from what I can see it looks extremely promising.  You can upload a file, paste text into a box to upload or point Topicmarks at a URL.  Then in justr a few minutes you have a synopsis of all the information in the document, pasted document or web site.  It's a great way to get a Cliff Notes type version of longer documents.  It breaks the information down in a number of ways including a Bullet like overview of the information, a more detailed summary, a tagcloud made from the data, an index of those words and where they can be found among the various segmented chucnks of information and finally a Properties tab breaking down the key information about the data (how many words, sentences, etc...)  There's a lot more to the utility than this but hopefully I've intrigued you enough to look at Topicmarks.