Researchers have noticed that readers are increasingly skimming instead of reading in depth. Skimming also occur in re-reading activities, where the goal is to recall specific topical facts. Bookmarks and highlighters were invented precisely to achieve this goal. For skimming activities, readers need effective ways to direct their attention toward the most relevant passages within text. We describe how we have enhanced skimming activity by conceptually highlighting sentences within electronic text that relate to search keywords. We perform the conceptual highlighting by computing what conceptual keywords are related to each other via word co-occurrence and spreading activation. Spreading activation is a cognitive model developed in psychology to simulate how memory chunks and conceptual items are retrieved in our brain. We describe the method used, and illustrate the idea with realistic scenarios using our system.

Blogging is a Web-based form of communication that is rapidly becoming mainstream. In this paper, we report the results of an ethnographic study of blogging, focusing on blogs written by individuals or small groups, with limited audiences. We discuss motivations for blogging, the quality of social interactivity that characterized the blogs we studied, and relationships to the blogger's audience. We consider the way bloggers related to the known audience of their personal social networks as well as the wider blogosphere of unknown readers. We then make design recommendations for blogging software based on these findings.