What is Linkky
Linkky is a collection of tools based around a very powerful text extraction and analysis engine. Lots of people are doing very clever stuff with text processing out there, using all sorts of advanced techniques to sort the wheat from the chaff, and we really hand it to them for all the work that they've done.
We thought it might be nice to put together some real world examples of what can be done with this sort of technology, coming out of the frustrations we have had as individuals.
So, there are three initial offerings, Xtractor, Mobile and Widget
Read all about them below:
Xtractor
Xtractor allows you to input some text, HTML, or a web address, and have it analysed by our engine. The results look very raw at the moment, as it was just our test environment until a few days ago. The basic idea is that you put stuff in, and you get a list of what phrases and words were interesting, with some scores associated with them. No XML (yet).
There will be lots of configuration options in the future.
For now it's pretty simple
Mobile
Mobile
is a lot more fun, and in part builds upon the work of the Phonifier
project (http://www.phonifier.com/).
Phonifier allows you to input a web address, and have the web
page returned in a format manageable for a mobile phone browser.
The mobile web is beginning to grow (finally) but most web
pages just do not account for the bandwidth and size restraints of a
mobile browser.
Linkky Mobile
adds a new layer by analyzing the web page, extracting useful words and
phrases, and hyperlinking them to a Google search.
At the moment, if you read something in a mobile browser, getting into
Google, and typing in a new search term ranges from the inconvenient to
the downright impossible, depending on the age and speed of your phone.
We seek to eliminate this, and save money on bandwidth to your mobile
as
well. We call it "Shrink and Link". You can get your own copy of the modified source code to allow you to set up your
own Phonifier gateway to our "Shrink
and Link" server. Just download the file here
Bookmark http://m.linkky.com
in your mobile browser
Widget
Everyone needs a widget these days, and we're no exception. You'll see one on the side of this page.
Basically, it reads the page you're on, and tries to extract the relevant terms (as you might have suspected by now). It then sticks them in a rolling list, which gives users three options.
Click on the phrase itself, and you get a Site Search. Mostly this is done through Google, but if you've installed the widget on Blogger, it will us the Blogger search. We hope to allow you to add your own custom search soon.
Click on the 
and you get a
Google search of that term.
Click on the 
and you get
Wikipedia results
Pretty soon there will be vote-type functionality to help yuo help us eliminate rogue phrases. We can always tune the engine better, although we do give you an option to do some basic tuning, including setting phrase length parameters, and deciding to have more or less phrases and words returned
You can also change the colors of the widget. The default is a rather eye-catching yellow.
Our biggest problem at the moment is trying to identify what is real text on the page, and what is furniture. We have ways we can do this, but at the moment. time prevents us from putting them all into operation.
Business Model
There will be ads. Of some sort. We're looking at the moment as to the best way to monetize the service without completely upsetting our users. We use a lot of processing power, and that does cost. As things grow, there will be subscriptions available to people who want to use the service a lot.
But first, let's just get it to work!
About Us
Not much to tell, really. We are a bunch of people driven by common frustrations. Jon Summerton is our chief spokesman (jon_at_linkky.com) and so he's the person to moan to. We are based in a number of geographically dispersed places around the globe, and decided to host the service in the UK for the time being, as that is suitably far from anywhere, while still having sign-up instructions in English
Feel free to come over to the blog and leave a comment, or drop us a line.