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Summize plucks sentiments out of the reviewosphere

Summize is the latest website to harvest and summarize opinion on the web

Blogs and sites such as Amazon and IMDb contain lots of reviews, but no-one has the time or energy to find and read more than a small fraction. The obvious solution is to get a computer to do it. Summize is the latest effort. According to TechCrunch:

Summize harvests all of this opinion and boils it down to a single heat map that it calls a "snip." This is a horizontal bar with colors ranging from red (wretched) to yellow (so-so) to green (great). It attempts to capture the collective sentiment about any given product at a glance.

The site rapidly discovered this wasn't such a good idea for colourblind users.

Summize might seem familiar to people who use Omgili, which has a similar coding system, but doesn't look as good. Another major site in this field is Metacritic. Here's a comparison of searches for Halo 3 on Summize, Omgili and Metacritic.

Where Summize scores is that you can play around and select like, dislike and disagree on, or "discover" someone such as Bob Dylan (who?).

It might even be useful if you fancied buying something such as a digital camera or MP3 player.

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