FAQ:  The Service and its Benefits

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What is Nexcerpt?
Nexcerpt is a sophisticated briefing service. It monitors selected web-based sources -- yours or ours -- and extracts relevant excerpts, showing the context of your Keywords. Using any browser, you select and annotate the excerpts, then publish automatically to any Audience. You can contact your clients, prospects, and employees with truly useful information; influence their awareness of events you know are important; or write a current, valuable newsletter in a few minutes, any day.

Bottom line: you use Nexcerpt to stay informed, extend your expertise, and influence people.

Please visit our online Guided Tour to discover how Nexcerpt works.

How does Nexcerpt work?
Every day, the fully customizable service extracts the timely, targeted citations you need, from a comprehensive array of authoritative online sources. Nexcerpt presents you targeted, relevant excerpts that provide essential context for the Keywords and topics of value to you.

You simply open your current Nexcerpt Draft, and, if you wish, add your expert comments to any excerpt. Feel free to record your comments in a single session, or accrue them over any period of time. You may exclude or include any excerpt, and flag any excerpt for delivery to any of your Audiences.

Your comments become part of the Report that Nexcerpt will publish, at the time you choose. When Nexcerpt delivers your expert Report, it creates a connection with everyone you need to touch. Your Audiences recognize your ongoing attentiveness to their interests, and can offer you feedback on any relevant topic.

Nexcerpt allows you to accomplish more with fewer resources, strengthens your connection to your constituencies, and enhances your standing as a market leader.

How does Nexcerpt differ from a typical web clipping service?
Nexcerpt provides all the features of a top-end clipping service - and it also enables you to communicate the best of those clips to any Audience. You review your clips online, select which are important to you and to your Audiences, add any expert comments you wish, and publish to any person, group, public web site, or intranet.

What is the benefit of using web-based sources versus a typical news feed?
News feeds, such as Reuters or Associated Press, are useful sources for certain types of information. That's why Nexcerpt includes material from those sources. However, news feeds generally are limited to the perspective of one organization, one team of writers, or one editorial intent.

Nexcerpt goes further, using proprietary technology to scan thousands of high quality, credible online sources for you every day. We gather excerpts from tens of thousands of articles to deliver you results that match your criteria precisely. You benefit from the work of thousands of writers, in hundreds of communities, organizations, and businesses -- an enormous array of personal and professional experience. You're free to suggest other web sources, specific to your needs, for Nexcerpt to review. A news feed simply cannot provide such flexibility and expansibility.

How does Nexcerpt differ from a typical service like LexisNexis, Factiva, or Moreover?
Many news delivery services rely on conventional news sources to obtain raw material. Nexcerpt also presents material from such outlets. However, those sources capture only a fraction of the important events of each day. With Nexcerpt, you're free to suggest other web sources, specific to your needs. This can include sources as diverse and targeted as corporate press releases, trade organization newsletters, personal web logs, local event monitors, and even your own intranet.

Nexcerpt permits far greater control over input, and output as well. As a sophisticated briefing service, Nexcerpt offers a process -- and broad control of your results -- that typical services simply can not. Nexcerpt provides the tools you need to select the most valuable excerpts, add your expertise, and publish to any Audience. You control your Queries, Audiences, editing, and scheduling easily, using any web browser.

How does Nexcerpt differ from a search engine?
Search engines often provide an out-of-date snapshot of the web. The best engines provide an album mingling both old and new. Nexcerpt, however, offers only new material, delivered for your review when that material first appears. Search engines are useful tools for finding point-in-time information, but can't provide the continuous, automatic research, nor the information dissemination, that Nexcerpt does so well.

With a search engine, you do all the work of finding the material you need -- manually, by sorting through tens of thousands of results. Next you must review sites to avoid outdated material, find citations you want, organize that material, mark it up, and prepare it for distribution through e-mail or for posting on the web. Some agents and semi-robotic aids ("bots") can automate part of the process for you, finding resources and sometimes even returning useful citations -- but you still must select, annotate, and distribute that material manually. Nexcerpt automates that entire process.