In Newsletters, some articles are much longer than others which makes the formatting look odd. With Smart Summaries, we now have a way to automatically compute an article summary for display rather than just showing the first 250 characters as is the normal method.
Smart Summaries use word and sentence analysis to determine which sentences are most important in a story. It then extracts these sentences as an article summary. Smart Summaries work well for news stories, blog entries and other articles that follow a standard sentence/paragraph layout. Smart Summaries don't work as well for articles where there is a lot of text in non-sentence form. For those blogs, the first 250 characters is the best way to shorten a story.
For example, from a 19 paragraph/624 word article from InfoWorld, Smart Summary was able to summarize the article as:
"Zend Technologies is putting the finishing touches to Zend Server, a new Web applications server aimed at mission-critical PHP applications."
When you see (SMART SUMMARY) preceeding an article summary, you'll know that our servers have been busy trying to summarize content as usefully as possible.