I’m afraid I won’t get much work done today. In a post in the mailing list for KMG Philadelphia, a member posted a quick reference to Silobreaker, a news aggregator and search engine that generates context. Right on the home page you can see what’s possible when a news from many sources is digested, analyzed semantically, and then put into visuals. The semantic analysis, entity extraction, reads text of news items and identifies the names of people, place names, companies, organizations, and themes. Relationships are identified based on co-occurence in themes, and ideas are clustered so you can see “hot spots.”

A “360 degree” search provides links to relevant articles, lists of related people, places, and keywords, and links. Default pages provide at-a-glance views of global issues, science & technology, business, and world events.

My favorite search is of course, the Network Search, which goes straight to building a network map of the entities identified in the search and their relationships. I did a search in the Network view of “Microsoft Yahoo” to see what I could glean about yesterday’s announcement the Microsoft was making a bid for Yahoo!. (You can click on the image above to see the blown-up result). You can see the strength of the relationship (numbers of articles) by the width of the lines. You can click on any of the entities to see a summary of the article(s) that reference it and links to those articles. You can adjust the filters so that you see only the names of people, only the companies involved, only the keyphrases (how about that “dominance”!) and so on.

Oh bliss, a tool that I have been long waiting for. Thanks, Silobreaker.