Portal Maximizer Helps Portals Soar
"Portal Maximizer attempts to build a bridge that automatically adds needed metadata (such as author name, document type, or whatever customized classification is desired by the particular company in question) to the document by analysing the content of the document as it is entered into the system. Some human oversight is still injected into the process, as the submitter can quickly vet the contents of the fields before adding the document to the system.

What is really cool, and also totally automated, is the insertion of additional context links into news articles "on the fly." If the portal has a fair bit of content related to a technical term or company name, this link is automatically added to a news story when the document is analysed by Portal Maximizer. These context links lead readers to additional information, and the beauty of it is, the authors of documents or technical staff do not have to spend time painstakingly building in links to relevant related information - Portal Maximizer builds them right into the documents as it works seamlessly with the content management system. Such technologies are implemented today on major portals such as Yahoo, but seemingly only on a limited basis, such as the automatic addition of company information links for company names or stock ticker symbols."

Wow! Here's Vivisimo's drill down feature crossed with something that looks like my webify the web applet dream.

06/11/01 update: the controversial Smart Tags that Microsoft is about to introduce in Office XP and IE6 also add links to documents on the fly.

07/23/01 update: see more stuff about smart tags, and look at RichLink for another "link+" system.

08/01/01 update: A standard for e-comments, about Annotea, an open-source initiative sponsored by the W3C.

08/03/01 update: Mystery links (about TOPtext, an advertising system coming with Kazaa, although I didn't experience it firsthand).