Verity, Inc. has announced a product that will scan an incoming news feed such as Dow Jones's Dow Vision information service and filter the information according to a weighted keyword system (no mention was made of Usenet). The system supposedly is more accurate at finding relevant articles than a standard keyword system that treats all keywords the same. The idea behind Topic Real Time is that it will reduce the information flow to a manageable stream for professionals with too little time to review the relevant publications. Unfortunately, Topic Real Time is quite pricey, with costs of $695 for a DOS client or $1000 for a Unix or OS/2 client while the Topic Real Time server starts at $15,600 and goes up. At those prices, we at TidBITS are not worried about becoming useless in the near future.

The theory of automatically culling information for dissemination to a single reader is a good one, though, and tools to provide such a service should be popular soon. The volume of information on several Usenet groups alone can take more processing time than most people have in a day, so any automated method of cutting down on the amount to process would be welcome. One product which is designed to do this is ClariNet's NewsClip language. We know very little about it other than it is designed to work with Usenet and ClariNet format messages, and it is now available as Evalu-Ware. It was posted to comp.sources.misc, and can be 'ftp'd from uunet's ~ftp directory in the file ClariNet/nc.tar.Z

Verity, Inc. -- 415/960-7600
ClariNet -- info@clarinet.com

Related articles:
InfoWorld -- 07-May-90, Vol. 12, #19, pg. 5
PC WEEK -- 07-May-90, Vol. 7, #18, pg. 63
InfoWorld -- 09-Jul-90, Vol. 12 #28, pg. 36