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Absolutes and Electronic Information

April 9, 2008

I find the research for my work fascinating. Periodically I root through some of the PDFs and PowerPoints used in my public talks.

Information in 2001

Today, while consolidating some information from a soon-to-be-retired NetFinity 5500, I came across a presentation I made to the legal information giant, Lexis Nexis, in year 2001.

The presentation sure didn’t win me any buddies in this $1 billion a year unit of the Euro-giant Reed Information. Reed, like the Thomson Corporation, maintains a low profile. Most people are unaware of what these two professional publishing companies do for a living, and I am not going to tell you that. You will have to figure it out for yourself.

My talk was given at some golf resort, and I don’t golf. I sat on my tail feather and waited to deliver my talk, which I titled “Information Professionals and In-Phase Services”. The main idea behind the talk was that anyone who used information for a living (lawyers, consultants, intelligence officers, and financial analysts) wanted current information in the context of their work.

The idea of stopping one thing to go ferret out a missing piece of information is growing long in the tooth. No, “long in the tooth” is too gentle even seven years after I wrote this presentation. Stupid, ill-advised, crazy, dumb — these are much more appropriate words. In year 2000, it was obvious — based on my research — that savvy users of information wanted information from one screen or dashboard. Furthermore that information should be [a] comprehensive, [b] current or fresh, and [c] in a form that allowed it to be cut-and-pasted or recycled without annoying manual reformatting.

I used this quote from Emily Dickinson to catch the crowd’s attention: “The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind…” No one knew what the heck I was talking about. To help the audience along, I used this chart from Forbes Magazine, October 2, 2000:

absolutes

The point of this study is that humans–more than two thirds of them in 2000–want fixed points in their lives. The notions of change, flux, transformation made people uncomfortable. The chart did little to win my audience’s confidence in my talk because I then told the group, “Absolutes are rarely found when we talk about electronic information.”

That did it. The audience knew that I was not a feel-good, how-to-make-a-million-in-real-estate guy. I was a speaker explaining a fundamental and disturbing property of electronic information; namely, it is not absolute. Digital information is a blob of mercury without mercury’s substance. Digital data are slippery, flowing and transforming without warning and with a speed incomprehensible to anyone familiar with information in printed form.

To illustrate this shift from Gutenberg’s approach to digital information, I highlighted these companies. Most of these are no longer with us, but one or two may evoke a fond recollection:

  • Webversa. The idea was interesting. Talk to your mobile phone and access your enterprise information. We now know that the “crackberry” and its derivatives reign supreme. The voice-to-search is just now, like the tender Kentucky tobacco shoots, poking into the market.
  • Free.fr. This French portal has undergone redo after redo. But in 2001, I liked the idea of clean design and point-and-click access to useful features, categories, and services.
  • WebZeer and Uzees. This was a start up using Microsoft technology. The idea was that a user could create a bundle of Web content and make that group available to users. The two services anticipated the social network bookmark functionality of Delicious.com and StumbleUpon.com, among others. WebZeer is, alas, no more.
  • Moreover.com. When I first saw this news aggregation site, I thought, “This is very good.” The business model has changed but Moreover.com is still in business. It provides third-party content to businesses, and some of its useful public-facing services have been curtailed.
  • PDAMedic.com foreshadowed the mobile information access push in health care. The software can still be found in some Palm OS repositories, but I think the company’s Web site is here and offers custom Palm programming.
  • Vindigo (formerly Zingy). The company appears to be thriving with its city guide products for the Palm and the Pocket PC. In 2004, the company was acquired by For-Side.com Co. Ltd.
  • Sagemaker. An enterprise content processing vendor that sold out to divine Interventures, which went out of business. You an read a case study of Sagemaker’s product and services here.

What these examples illustrated, I believed, was that the notion of dedicated online access to information was yielding to a more flexible type of access. Information would be available on the user’s terms, not the vendor’s.

The Lexis Nexis group wasn’t too comfortable with this approach. In retrospect, I think my approach caused the audience of Lexis Nexis professionals to go “shields up”. I was running into their desire for absolutes about electronic information. Instead I was suggesting that the idea of dedicated red Lexis Nexis terminals belonged in a museum. Furthermore, instead of an exclusive on news from high profile sources like the New York Times, news was a commodity, ripe for harvesting and streaming using modern year 2001 technology like Moreover’s. Users, not publishers, would bundle information and send it to colleagues the way the WebZeer and Uzee engineers made possible. The medical professional would no longer go to the library to look at Reed Elsevier’s health data. The doc would get the information on a handheld mobile device.

My goodness, my audience thought, the sky is falling.

Yep, it was, and it is.

Absolutes in 2008

Before my trek to Canada’s frozen north, I had lunch with a starched and smart legal librarian. I asked her about the world of for-fee legal information. She replied that attorneys were very aware of ways to obtain legal information from public sources on the Internet. She said, “I’m still busy. Some information requires an online legal search. I just do less of the for-fee searching than I used to.”

Lexis Nexis, therefore, has a way to keep its online revenue flowing. Since my talk, Lexis Nexis has acquired a wide range of companies. Lexis Nexis is in the risk analysis business, the law firm back office business, and in the online access business. I’ve heard that both Lexis Nexis and Westlaw (Thomson’s super legal information service) are following roughly similar paths to generate additional revenues.

But a little poking around on Google reveals that the amount of legal information of excellent quality is significant. Google offers its own online patent service here. Google indexes big chunks of US government information here, but the name “Uncle Sam” is now a less colorful “usgov” moniker. Even in rural Kentucky, I can access certain Kentucky legal documents here.

I’m not sure if my presentation helped or hindered Lexis Nexis’ revenue growth. My bet would be that I set the company back about a decade, and it is only now–at a remove of 84 months–able to think clearly once again.

To wrap up this essay about information absolutes, permit me to posit the following:

  1. Information absolutes may exist. I just can’t give you one. I hate to repeat the old saws about change as the only constant, so I won’t.
  2. The fluidity and easy transformations are the new environment. Unlike the pre-Renaissance world, re-invention creates excitement. Innovations are like sex-crazed gerbils. Innovations beget more innovations.
  3. Traditional companies have their work cut out for them. I recall the old buggy whip anecdote from college. Two companies make buggy whips. Along comes a Model T. One company starts making seat covers. The other company sticks with buggy whips and goes out of business. Giant firms are going to have to decide. One decision means a new Lexus (pun intended). The other translates to the unemployment line.
  4. The mobile revolution is underway, and it will further exacerbate problems for many traditional information companies. (Yes, I’m referring to telecommunication firms who don’t understand that Google’s “white band” initiative for wireless is just another attack on their hegemony. Google’s in the telco business to stay. The spectrum bid was just one tactic, not the war.) Mobile access to information is a potential gold mine. Who is in an office much anymore? Are you?
  5. Information businesses have a tendency to be monopolistic. How many power generation companies are selling you power? Answer: one. You have limited choice. Information is a similar utility business so consolidation is a key driver at this time.
  6. Users don’t have a clue about the larger implications of electronic information. This is as true today as it was in year 2001. Privacy, for example, is a big deal. I’m not sure my father who uses a PC every day has a clue what “privacy while online” means. The implications of monitoring are significant and largely talked about at the third-grade level.

With the dynamic of 2008 swirling around us, the implications of electronic information are no easier today than they were in year 2001. There’s lots of excitement ahead, not just for Lexis Nexis but for you and me.

Stephen Arnold, April 9, 2008

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Database, Feature, Online (general) 

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