“The strategy described in the article links words within the article to corresponding words in the title of an article in a repository (implemented via Wikipedia in the example). What that will do is miss a lot of relevant matches where that particular word isn’t in the title, but is strongly present in the body. Or, where that word isn’t used but a synonym is.”

This particular comment misses the point a bit. The idea is an interface enhancement that works in favor of the user’s experience and the publisher’s desire to hang onto readers. Clearly, because there are so many content management systems out there, how this enhancement fits is dependent on the architecture of the system itself. Wikipedia was an easy example because of the way titles are strongly present in the URL. That being said, there is a lot of value to be gained from an SEO perspective in optimizing content so that there is a strong correlation between the title of the article and its content.

The concern about clutter is valid, although again this is an implementation specific detail. The sites that care about the user experience would obviously have to make this consideration. I think, however, that it could be done nicely without clutter.

Your point that “the meanings of individual words in an article are often tangential to the articles underlying theme or concept” is absolutely correct.

At the same time, we have witnessed the growth of bookmarking and tagging tools to help readers make connections between large numbers of disparate content sources. These tools have shown that it is possible to narrow vast numbers of keywords down to a relatively small number of tags, within a given topic. This sort of organization is still in its infancy, but there is a lot of promise, in my opinion, not only for supporting what I proposed but also for allowing users to organize the news sites they read, by themselves. That’s a whole other discussion, however.

For some sites, you’re right, it would be tremendously challenging to implement this. For those sites that are highly optimized for automated referencing, however, it would not be as difficult. As with anything in business, if the potential reward is greater than the cost, then it’s worthwhile.

However, the approach described in this article isn’t necessarily particularly useful for newspaper article readers.

The strategy described in the article links words within the article to corresponding words in the title of an article in a repository (implemented via Wikipedia in the example). What that will do is miss a lot of relevant matches where that particular word isn’t in the title, but is strongly present in the body. Or, where that word isn’t used but a synonym is.

It can also clutter the original article if a good proportion of the key words are converted into links – it can make the article more difficult to read. Take a look at some of the articles on Yahoo News to see what I mean.

Even more importantly, the meanings of individual words in an article are often tangential to the articles underlying theme or concept. Yet the reader looking for more background is most likely to be interested in background relevant to the overall theme, rather than to a bunch of component details.

And, as to an implementation, IMHO the notion of having a client-based lookup could work for relatively small volume text like IM. But for a high volume news website with non-tiny articles, the linking would have to be done at the server. And, while a browser plugin could handle simple pattern-matching, I doubt if it could handle the kind of context annotations we’re talking about here.

I don’t mean to diminish the potential value of adding background annotation of news articles. I simply want to point out that it’s a tremendously difficult challenge.

(This comment was also posted in E-Media Tidbits – http://www.poynter.org/article_feedback/article_feedback_list.asp?user=91647&id=98759)