(You will need to read yesterday's entry for today's to make sense - here's part 1 and here's part 2.)

So, yesterday I got on the subject of information - and specifically, the difference between simply gathering information and analyzing it, and why both are so important in this new Information Age of ours. So that of course gets us talking about the actual information analysts out there (who, for those who missed it yesterday, I think is going to become one of the most important and prolific types of workers in the Information Age, like "managers" did during the Industrial Age) - of how an information analyst best does ones job, of what lessons have been learned now about the endeavor. And this is especially interesting for me to contemplate, since I showed yesterday how what the main job of this arts center is going to be that I'm trying to open these days - to be information analysts ourselves, to take in the vast raw numbers of underground artists out there, and to recommend the ones we feel are most worthwhile to our paying audience.

And let's face facts - in almost all the examples now we've seen of information systems becoming big or popular, it's not only the size of the database that's of crucial importance but also how this information is analyzed and presented. Take the example I was using yesterday, how so many people mistake the first success stories on the internet as due to simply having a plethora of information. If you really look, though, at who for example won the online bookstore wars (which I'm counting as Amazon here), it wasn't actually the number of books they were selling that was so unusual - both Borders and Barnes & Noble sell just as many, for example. It was the way Amazon handled and sorted their information that really turned the tide - the fantastic interface they created, the personal account that remembered all your choices, the algorithim-based recommendations of similar books. To be sure, Amazon had to have their ten million books for sale or whatever to ultimately win the war; but once they got to that point, as did half a dozen other places in the '90s, it was the way they actually analyzed this ten-million-title database that put them over the top.

And so it is with all the other examples I used yesterday: that the site currently winning the search-engine wars (Google) is doing so because of the unique system they created for sorting hits by relevancy, not just by the number of pages they have cached; the site that won the online bidding wars (eBay) did so mostly because of the amazingly reliable system they created for customers to check the ethics of other customers, not just because there were a ton of things for sale there. And so it's interesting, I think, to determine what about information analysis makes you a Google or eBay or whatever, and what makes you a Pets.com that loses $20 billion in nine months and goes out of business. And especially, like I said, since this subject is so near to the ultimate success of my own arts center.

So we can definitely start by saying this, I think - that the validity of the analyst in question almost always plays a huge role in how successful that analyst is. Take the curious case of the podcast format, for example, which of course many of us have been watching with excitement this year as it's continued to catch on. Ultimately podcasting isn't exactly anything new or ground-breaking - it's just audio programs, like what you've heard on radio for almost a hundred years now, and distributed over the internet, which people have been doing for over a decade. What's new is that these programs are being delivered via automatic feed now, so that you can run a piece of software on your own computer (for example) that can read this feed, and automatically detect when a new program is up, like a "TV Guide" with random start-times that automatically updates itself every second of the day. And then of course the killer aspect of it all is that it removes all the middle steps of actually listening to online audio content - it downloads the file for you in the middle of the night and sends it automatically to your MP3 player, so that in the morning all you have to do is unplug and go, just as easily as listening to your Walkman or car stereo.

Pretty cool, of course - but just like every other piece of new technology in history, podcasting has been growing in popularity only incrementally, because that's simply the way new technology grows. And so up to this summer you had this situation in the podcasting industry that was very similar to what you see in the beginning years of almost any new technology - 10 or 20 or 30 companies in business, all of them directly competing against the others, none of them a clear winner, all of them sharing roughly the same number of fans and with a lot of arguments back and forth over minor technical issues.

But then look what happened this summer - iTunes, the online music service run by Apple, decided to embrace the podcasting format themselves, and let people both add new feeds with a couple of clicks and subscribe to feeds with a couple of clicks. And what happened? In the first 24 hours of it being live, the world suddenly had twice as many podcast listeners than before; then 24 hours later it had doubled again, and 24 hours later it had doubled again.

And I sat around of course and read all these bitch blog posts from all these tech guys when it happened, about how inferior Apple's service was to, say, Podcrap.nu or whatever, and how they simply couldn't understand why millions of people suddenly embraced podcasting the moment Apple also did, when there were clearly so many superior podcasting programs out there from those other 20 companies that had been in business for a year now. But the answer was simple, really - it's because the general public trusts Apple when they decide to get heavily involved with something new, and they don't trust the helpful folks at Podcrap.nu or whatever. I mean, I'm certainly that way sometimes - why should I invest all this money and time and training in your way of doing things, when your company might not even be open six months from now?

It's the same, really, as another incident earlier this year, when the Associated Press decided to adopt the RSS format (which is the actual feed that podcasts use to distribute audio files). A real quick history, for those who need it...

The Associated Press is basically a collection of news organizations, who all agree to send one reporter to cover an event and then all the organizations in question getting to publish the story afterwards. (The AP has a really fascinating history, too - the entire reason they started, in fact, was because in the 1800s, all these New York newspapers were sending reporters out into Hudson Bay in rowboats, trying to get the latest news off the European luxury liners pulling in before any of their competitors could. After something like half a dozen reporters died from the endeavor, though, the newspapers sat down and hashed out the idea that eventually became the AP.)

Anyway, two of the things the AP is really known for is 1) being around for just forever; and 2) embracing new technology that entire time. The AP, for example, was the first commercial company in history to own their own telegraph line (which at the time was only the second telegraph line even in existence); they've been sending photos to each other over phone lines since the 1950s, etc. As a result, many other news organizations in the world now take their cues off the AP, when it comes to embracing new technology, because the AP has the track record and the reputation to back up the choices they make.

RSS might well have stuck around in one form or another, whether or not the AP adopted it; now that they have, though, it's almost guaranteed that it will continue to be a staple in the Heterotopia (my fancy word for the internet), and will continue to be supported and improved by thousands upon thousands of other outlets. And so this I think is a very important lesson for this arts center of mine - that one of our key early goals will be to simply establish our reputation as reliable guides to the underground arts, to the point that people will automatically support our new projects simply because the old ones were so good. And this is why I think it's so important to be a purist little shit when it comes to things like this - to not compromise, for example, and take on a morally-questionable sponsor for a ton of money, because something like that can ruin your reputation among lovers of the underground arts. It's a tricky situation, to be sure, an endeavor that has no easy answer for success, but definitely one that I think is important right at the beginning of it all.

And then of course there's this lesson about information analysis, which is that the best analysts out there need to be natural storytellers as well, to know how to both look at and present information with a traditional narrative structure in mind. And this goes back into what I was saying yesterday, how there is now just so much insanely more information recorded in the world than we humans will ever be able to digest with our brains, even though we want to take in as much of it as possible. We find shortcuts, then, to be able to take in more information than we would be able to in other situations; or, that is, ways to take in lots of information so that it sticks, so that it adds relevancy to our lives, so that we're glad at the end that we took the time to absorb that information in the first place.

The way we create these shortcuts is to use formats we humans are already familiar with - like the narrative structure, for example, where a story is told, one that goes from point A (beginning) to B (middle) to C (end), and with lessons to be learned along the way and a change to the characters involved as a result. We're familiar with stories - we're very familiar with them, and familiar with what they're trying to get across, and where in those stories they get it across, and the tricks and gimmicks used to get it across. Hand me, say, some table showing all the results from some track meet in Oregon in 1974, and I could care less; show me a documentary about one of those runners, though, and all the shit he had to go through to get to that point, and suddenly that table becomes a whole lot more relevant in my life.

This is why I think, for example, that Steven Spielberg's Shoah Project is such an important one, even though technically it would make more sense to simply hand all those resources over to a larger and older Holocaust remembrance organization. It's because Shoah has another mission as well, not just to simply collect as much data as they can but also to present finished projects about this data to the general public, documentaries and websites and books, teaching material and traveling exhibits and the like. And this is just such an important element of something like Holocaust remembrance, as I learned in Dachau in 2003; that seeing a list of the dead doesn't hold a candle to actually experiencing the stories of those who were there, of hearing the narrative structure behind their capture, their imprisonment, their liberation.

It's extremely important, of course, that that giant boring academic list of it all is kept as well, for those who are devoting their own lives to the subject, or who have special information to look up for a special reason. For the rest of us, though, something like the Shoah Project is crucial to us, because it lets us appreciate the horror of the Holocaust and the importance of remembering it, without having to do the dozens of hours of invoice-scanning that an actual Holocaust scholar himself would do. And so this is another lesson for applying to my arts center, that it's not simply the finished products that are being offered that is important, but the sense of humanity behind the artists themselves. And that's why I have so many plans in place as far as getting artists and the general public to interact so much: to do a major interview with each artist before their book or show, for example, about their lives and inspirations, that people will be able to download at the website or read in text form; to get as many of our customers as possible to write critical reviews of our products, so that when, say, a new book comes out, there will be 50 or 75 critical thoughts floating around on the web already about it; hell, to simply get our audience hanging out with artists more, before and after shows, shooting the shit and learning more about why they should take this artist's work seriously to begin with.

Oh, and there was even another example I was going to try to squeeze in today, concerning citizen journalists and why they just so happen to be getting so popular at this particular moment in history. But alas, I am once again out of space; and that whole thing about citizen journalism wasn't going to bring up a new point anyway, just support a point I've already made, so I guess I'll just let it go. As always, feel free to drop a line if these entries have had your own brain ticking; as always, I'll run the more interesting responses here at the journal when appropriate.