The Cole Digest, April 3, 1996

In previous weeks Chris Feola of the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American has talked about two dimensions of information: the information itself and time. There is also a third important dimension which he will discuss in this last part of the series: context.

Context is a rare and wondrous thing on the Internet. More than one on-line wag has said that the 'Net has become so vast and meaningless that for many people it is a substitute for life.

Context is so obvious in current media that we tend not to notice it. We know without thinking that the most prominent story in a newspaper or the first one on a news broadcast is the most important (at least in the view of the people in charge of the product) and the stuff buried in the back is ... well, the stuff that deserves to be buried in the back.

We also judge context by the messenger who brings us information. We have different expectations for the information we glean from a network television news broadcast than from an infomercial. We have different expectations for the information we receive from the New York Times or our local newspaper as we do for one of those supermarket tabloids bannered with "Wife kept dwarf lover under bed for seven years!"

But the 'Net's great virtue is also its great weakness. It is possible to search the world in moments and gather tons of information, thousands of documents, on almost any subject imaginable.

It can also be difficult to impossible to ascertain where that information came from and whether any of it is reliable. The vast searching tools such as Wais -- Wide Area Information Services -- Gopher and WebCrawler index and retrieve data indiscriminately, without judgement as to the source.

And even if you know enough about the 'Net to be able to determine that "LOC" in the "http://LOC" address for the document you just downloaded stands for Library of Congress, you still don't know whether your particular find originated in official government records or the science fiction section.

It is this lack of context that has led Nora Paul -- director of the Poynter Institute library, news research guru and 'Net surfer extraordinaire -- to say frequently that using the Internet for research "gives me the creeps."

One of the most important roles in new media will be putting things in context on-line, just as we put things in context now by putting the items we deem most important at the front of the paper or newscast.

Which brings us back to our database. A solid client-server system will allow us to provide information to our viewers and subscribers at the speed of light, rather than the speed of gossip.

There's an old story (told in a slightly different form by Harvard Business School's Theodore Levitt) about the people who ran the Pennsylvania Railroad. Around the turn of the century they were approached by some of the inventors working with the newfangled automobile technology with a brand new idea: the truck.

PRR officials sent the inventors away. "We're in the railroad business," said the railroad men.

So they were, and so they went out of business when the transportation business -- which they should have been in -- shifted to trucks.

Now the turn of a new century is upon us; indeed, the turn of the millennium. And it's time to decide what business we're in.

It's time to decide what age we're in. If we're going to run an information business in an Information Age, it's time to rebuild our businesses around an information system.

That means building our businesses around databases.

Thanks Chris.

Onward.

\dmc

[THE COLE DIGEST is written by consultant David M. Cole, editor and publisher of the industry newsletter THE COLE PAPERS. The DIGEST is made available to PressLink subscribers every Wednesday at no extra charge. Send comments by e-mail to cole@plink.geis.com. The COLE DIGEST is the property of The Cole Group, a California sole proprietorship. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of The Cole Group is prohibited. Copyright (C) 1996, The Cole Group. Opinions expressed are those of The Cole Group, unless otherwise noted.

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