There's a lot of information out there... but it's not all good data and certainly isn't all smart. What's the difference?
Consider your kitchen. Everything is inside it to make a meal, but it's not all relevant at every meal. You may not use a skillet when baking a pie, for instance. Your kitchen has "information" in it; data are the relevant components to your project.
The internet helps people and also gets them into trouble. Millennials are typically the generation that will run to the web and look up information to refute what someone says or to throw together a paper for class. But information isn't useful if you don't know how to identify the data within...
If you don't have the skills to set yourself apart, you don't just go online, read about a topic and consider yourself an expert. (Well, you shouldn't... anyway.) To learn about something or understand how to analyze a topic, you need to research, identify important pieces of information, whittle it down to data points, and then see how these pieces play together, fit together, work together, or cause disruption together.
If your big pond of information is drained down to some key pieces of data, how (or if) they interact is called intelligence. Projects that use higher level of intelligence typically present their findings in logical, clear, and direct manners. Projects that don't rate as high on the "good to great" factors usually just throw some data your way. The manner in which you put your eggs and flour together says if you will get bread or a cake. Your data put together smartly makes it intelligent - or not.
One of the biggest information oceans right now are US political races. If you don't understand how the information is being presented to you, then you can't determine if you are getting real intelligence or some neatly-strung data points. Make sure you know the difference when it comes to topics that are important to you and your family, you and your business, you and your community.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/08/25/could-google-inc-really-decide-the-2016-presidenti.aspx
