I think you are correct in your assessment that information can be categorized in terms of being required for decisions around allocating resources, or the subject of an allocation of a resource (attention) itself. I am not sure how important it is to classify the information at the source, however, but rather concentrate on the purpose for which the information is demanded.

When your information has strategic value, customers protect it for you. For instance I wonder how much companies like Bloomberg have to worry about piracy on their leased terminals. Strategic information is sensitive to both timeliness and authenticity, and both of these are of substantive value to a customer. However, the customer is likely to be sensitive to ostensible rent-seeking, and will swiftly gravitate toward the lowest price for the same type of information (indeed, the type of strategic information is often fungible).

For information that is not strategic but still represents a substantive truth about the world, be it a scientific publication, census dataset or current event, it is often more useful to spread, rather than to hoard it. Governments and NGOs are increasingly opening their datasets and companies like Elsevier are reviled for penning up their content.

The final type is the content that is an experience in itself, be it primarily a delivery mechanism for the first two types or an original unit of culture. As such I see the desire to share it out-of-band to potentially vary a great deal. I see quality, convenience, authenticity and timeliness as drivers for direct trade on content of this type. However, since there is already a trade on attention going on, I feel that efforts to usurp it will become less tolerable as time goes on. This includes display ads and interstitials (commercials).

Product placement is tolerable in fiction because it ties the story to the real world, but there is an upper bound to the amount we can saturate a story before it starts to look like I, Robot. In-content link ads like Snap and affiliate programs like Amazon are an improvement in some ways to staking out advertising real estate on a Web page, but in my opinion the technology is crude and obtuse and in some cases breaks the Web (by passing links through an exit filter). In my ideal scenario, Web authors and editors would weave sponsored links into their content and layout with the same care TV and film directors choose product placements.

I think, however, the greatest hope for content at large is to simply use it as fluid to elicit trades of more tangible products and services under the producer’s control, not dissimilar to 1980s Saturday-morning cartoons, but more nuanced. JJ Abrams and his ilk seem to have a bead on this technique. Other than that, I believe that if the information isn’t strategic, there has to be a value-add — a pretty package, timeliness, or a unique experience.

I recommend Kevin Kelly’s piece Better than Free for an elaborate, if not definitive discussion of alternatives to monetizing content.

If you still want to continue to argue on how to use the word “science in its more restricted contemporary sense”, you’d probably have to continue your quest here. As for vector mathematics: Information that has an equal amount of both scientific and practical value, will have to be pinpointed in between both extremes. One could argue whether the two vectors neutralize themselves mathematically or whether the combination of two geometrically opposite factors raises the entertainment value, defining a higher end point. Now that would be an interesting discussion.

Information can be both highly scientific and highly practical (see my Alzheimer’s example above). The chart depicts this as impossible. “Scientific” and “theoretical” are not synonymous.

If you wish to maintain the axes in your diagram, perhaps the word scientific should be replaced with theoretical.

One problem is that we are coming out of a period of huge consolidation of media which could demand higher prices with little or no accountability. We are entering a period where a million publishers are blooming on which we have actual viewing metrics. Which leads us to the other problem…

…which is that online ad rates are currently tied to a crappy metric known as the “page view” rather than a metric that does not yet exist which is the “attention”-metric. (I think Nielsen NetRatings is shifting to Time on Site or some such variant. I’ll believe it when we stop seeing ad deals done in CPM and CPC.) If the online experience gets more fragmented, there will be a plateau in the price of display advertising online. But if we create more compelling experiences, there may be a possibility for us to move towards the ideal of Cost Per Unit of Attention.

Practical information helps you deciding how to act; scientific information helping you to decide what to think. The more practical the more it is focused on actions, the more scientific the more it is focused on theory. Plain wrong or dead simple?

And as I said before these are vectors: There is no purely scientific or practical or artistic or financial information.

I’d say that scientific knowledge is often highly practical, and of immediate use (e.g., science may show that exercise leads to lesser chance of Alzheimer’s). Your diagram indicates that as knowledge becomes more practical, it becomes less scientific, and vice versa. To me this seems just plain wrong. Am I reading the diagram incorrectly?

Is this what you are actually trying to depict, or is it a just matter of aesthetics to have the diagram appear the way it does?

I’m sure you are aware that while scientific information is often freely available in some form, there are countless subscription-based scientific (and humanistic) journals out there. If you want access to most research data and conclusions then you have to pay for it. I’m not so sure that you are paying for the information itself as much as the time required to produce and verify it.

Specialist information may require hundreds of hours to gather data, interpret it, review it, read additional information, and obtain peer commentary. In addition, most academic papers go through a significant review period when submitted for publication and you pay for access to information that is deemed to have passed through “quality control” (at the hands of apparent experts with decades of knowledge, experience, and skill) and met the standards of the publication.

While the internet makes it cheap to publish information and easy to access many more sources (of varying quality), I’m not aware that it has significantly changed the labour costs or expertise required for certain types of information production. Some forms of information require more time and skill to produce than others, and are less ephemeral or transient.

Keeping the focus on the information produced by newspapers (in countries with extensive internet use). I would suggest that their unique information is ephemeral, transient, and more easily produced than many other forms of information. It may take experience and time to produce opinion pieces and editorials, especially when it comes to geo-political or economic stories, but this is also the type of information that non-media experts regularly share on their blogs or with the media itself. The media may have difficulty monetizing their form of information simply because so much of it is freely available from other sources and not necessarily at the cost of reduced accuracy or authority.

It will be interesting to see how online advertising pricing changes as paper sales decrease but I suspect that online advertising on “newspaper” sites is going to be problematic due to the tendency of people to filter out adverts, the significant number of people who are using browser add-ons that block adverts, and the ease with which you can access information away from the source itself (one of the main complaints from NewsCorp).

What are the chances for local news providers? Local being relative of course. Perhaps we would be willing to pay for information and news from our town, or for a paper dealing with domestic issues in a small country, or for specialist news. While there is no desire to pay for information that is available from dozens of sources and being widely discussed, maybe people would be less averse to paying to support local news gathering and information if it does indeed tend to be less available online but more relevant to our daily lives.

Obviously this is a gross oversimplification that doesn’t address questions as to who will be paid to actively hold politicians to account, uncover corporate scandals, produce extensively researched articles on important issues, and gather information and stories from areas that have no ability to tell their own story without external agents. If we want that, and consider it an essential part of our societies, then how does it pay for itself in the future if online advertising isn’t doing it and people don’t want to directly pay? Perhaps you have some opinions given your direct involvement with newspapers and their online existence.

A version of this is over at http://peter.evans-greenwood.com/2009/08/31/inside-vs-outside/ though it’s stated in terms of age and distance.

r.

PEG