Touchstone Intelligence Is Not A Jason Bourne Nightmare

I received an e-mail from Chris Saad of Touchstonelive, describing some media they received, and just for a second, flashed back to a couple of Robert Ludlum novels and an image of Matt Damon beating the snot out of me.

But that was Treadstone. Touchstone Live is one of these new breed of intelligence filters that organizes your RSS feeds (and other material) into a coherent picture for you to quickly read the day's news.

I completely dig this stuff, though I am without an invitation to the alpha. I'm looking around trying to correct that (maybe this post will help). Basically, companies are attempting to clear up some of the data smog by offering you technical solutions to the overwhelming flood of information that is available.

The collection part is good, but to date, I've seen nothing that beats a good human brain, Google, and an RSS reader, but that may be on the verge of changing. The biggest problem is semantics. Computers, no matter how fast or powerful they are, still aren't capable of recognizing words as symbols for other words. Thus, a computer program can't recognize puppy as a kind of dog, unless puppy is coded as a kind of dog in the system.

The popular myth that the software "learns" is just hype, as the computer can analyze, but learning is an entirely different state of affairs. Currently, your brain still wins, but someone well versed in online monitoring, a good writer, and a possessor of TouchstoneLive or competing products is going to be a very influential force in aggregating information.

Or so we all hope. In the meantime, I'll keep using my skills to present the information through our market research reports. After all, there's already more than you can read out there - taking more in is not the problem, it's compiling the report that brings the value.