TextPool: Visualizing Live Text Streams

In today\´s fast-paced world it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay abreast of the public discourse. With the advent of hundreds of closed-captioned cable channels and internet-based channels such as news feeds, blogs, or email, knowing the "buzz" is a particular challenge. TextPool addresses this problem by quickly summarizing recent content in live text streams. The summarization is a dynamically changing textual collage that clusters related terms. We tested TextPool with the content of several RSS newswire feeds, which are updated roughly every five minutes. TextPool was able to handle this bandwidth well, and produced useful summarizations of feed content.