The
IEEE Spectrum highlights the upcoming production release of IBM's Web Fountain text analysis service, highlighting premium content from Factiva. Unfortunately, not much has changed since our
earlier new analysis on this topic to persuade us that Web Fountain is going to make a huge amount of difference to the world of content and related technologies just yet. Web Fountain's marriage of highly sophisticated text analysis and extremely powerful hardware is cool stuff, no doubt, and provides content in a powerful new context that can bring a new level of value to content aggregation. But it does little to enhance the value of the underlying premium content objects that power it as individual items that can be shared with other knowledgeable people. Using technology to increase the value of the human element in publishing content is at least as important to premium content value as machines that automate human intellect. Expect Web Fountain to have some positive impact in the marketplace, but expect that most of its impact will wind up being indirect - most likely as a source of quality and relevance ranking that can be used to power other more publishing-oriented venues.