Monday 6 August 2007

Summaries, summaries

You're a busy person, we all are. So what happens when you want to select from a range of items with really long descriptions? Sometimes it would be great if you could just read a quick summary of the text.

Here is a quick example of a brief summary. I also provide the full text that it was generated from:

Full Text:
A short clip from Surrealist film "The Inconspicuous Furry Banana." Mia
Crackpot and Iona Frisbee meet a wizard, who tells them a recipe to
freeze time. But things go horribly wrong- and instead of freezing time,
they accidentally replace time with a tangerine. Then suddenly, they
begin to experience vivid hallucinations. One of them believes they are
an inconspicuous furry banana, and the other believes that they are half
a metre long with wings that can fly. Together they believe that their
mission is to meet the wizard master- and to save him from the imaginary
sprites... Narration by Chewy Benson.


256 characters
Then suddenly, they begin to experience vivid hallucinations. One of
them believes they are an inconspicuous furry banana, and the other
believes that they are half a metre long with wings that can fly.
Narration by Chewy Benson.


150 characters
Then suddenly, they begin to experience vivid hallucinations. Narration
by Chewy Benson.


Now if you had a list of ten items, would you prefer 10 full descriptions, or 10 of the shorter versions?

If you are interested, here is the video that this text was describing:

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