It's easy to forget how good computers are at the grunt work. IBM, perhaps unsurprisingly, look to have been turning huge resources loose on the web to try to extract meaning from all that information. [Thanks Jeff for the pointer]

"IBM's breakthrough is called WebFountain - half a football field's worth of rack-mounted processors, routers, and disk drives running a huge menagerie of programs. All this hardware and software is dedicated to one purpose: making sense of the churning ocean of information, opinion, and falsehood that roils the Internet every second of every day." [ IEEE Article]

Essentially, what they're doing is structuring the web. XML, shock horror, is not something most people are concerned with. IBM send agents with specific "knowledge" (e.g. about doughnuts) to trawl for everything and anything on that subject, and then make sure it's in a sensible, searchable XML format.

And they've teamed up with Factiva (a Reuters and Dow Jones news company) so that something can be done with all this structured information.

Clare Hart, president and CEO of Factiva thinks "this is the next logical step toward giving people intelligence that they can act upon".

Possibly. It certainly seems exciting. But what sort of people? Moderators is my guess. And if you'll excuse the pun, this WebFountain of knowledge is great, but you need a good WebGardener to put it in a sensible context.

Links:
IEEE Article - A Fountain of Knowledge
IBM - Press Release