People Will Pay Good Money for Something, and it Ain't Information, or... Be Yourself, Get Rich, and Go to Heaven DIGITALLY!!

INVESTOR ALERT: With the proliferation of the Internet, access to information appears to be decreasing in value. We recommend that our clients consider reinvesting their funds into quirky habits, interesting tastes, cowboy hats, green shoes, and other stuff like that, because The Fat Man says it would be smart for some reason.

Aww, dang, now I have to back that up somehow. Oh, well. Here goes...;

We can certainly say that, for anybody with access to the Web, all that information still has value, but access to information is no longer the thing we crave. Increasingly, the more scarce and therefore more valuable thing is information sorting.

This is by no means an abstract idea; we see it illustrated every day.

Look at the daily hell we call e-mail: We hate Spam. Who are the butt-heads that create this stuff? Are they the lowest of the low or what? Sorting through the Swamp of Spam eats up our bandwidth, and we wish somebody would find all the Spam and pull it out of our in baskets for us. We'd pay money for that. We do pay money for that. In fact, we occasionally catch ourselves wishing we could pay somebody to read our e-mail for us. We appreciate when people use those up-arrows appropriately in their e-mails. We can't bear it when somebody copies us on a message that has no relevance to our most pressing issues, even if there is interesting information in that e-mail. Many of us don't even read the joke messages that come from our friends any more--unless we notice in the header that the message comes from somebody whose taste in jokes we trust to the ends of the earth.

A pile of junk mail crowds our snail mail boxes, and we leaf through it all looking for important documents, messages from people we know and like, or a catalog from our favorite store--one we can trust to carry things that are to our taste. We didn't intend to let all of those magazines pile up on the coffee table, but we haven't had time to sort through them yet.

Many of us have a media backlog--a long list of movies that we've taped or that have been recommended by acquaintances or DVD's loaned to us by relatives. We have CD's of our friends' bands. We have closets of VHS tapes that we may never watch. My friend Graeme Devine liked so many TV shows, he decided to let his VCR watch the shows for him. He just tapes a show, and then erases the tape. If we watch a movie out of a sense of obligation, we might have an awful experience, or we might be pleasantly surprised--either way, we usually (and rightly) expect the worst. BUT if our favorite film critic or our best buddy--somebody whose taste we trust--has recommended it, we watch with anticipation of a really good experience, and we are often rewarded for that.

Do you see the magnificently Human element that promises deliverance from each of these Modern Hells? Follow the trail of clues and help Fatty find the Secret Word.

--Access to information: Every[digital]body's got it. They are swamped with it. If you don't believe me, just try downloading the Web in a single lifetime.

--Information sorting: We crave it. We'll pay for it. But we often don't know where to get it. A lot of the systems we try turn out to be disappointing. Some of us end up wondering what the criteria are that are common to a good information sorting system.

--The common criterion of Information Sorting: Trust. If Gene and Roger like it, I'll watch it. If it's on O'Reilly, it's interesting to me. If it's Versace, Tommy will wear it.

--How do I know if I trust something? It comes from a source that is trustworthy.

--How does the Human Trustworthiness Radar (HTW) detect that something can be trusted? It looks for patterns in the signals sent out by the source. It looks for patterns in the source's Behavior. It parses any quirks in it's Personality. It analyzes...

Character.

You said the secret word!!!

Dude, if I may call you that, Dear Reader, you know in your heart that this is true. You GLOW when somebody you trust in a certain field or a certain way lays a bit of info on you that might help you decide where to go for your next book, movie, website, operating system or any other dose of digits. You are delighted even if, no, especially if, the recommendation is something you wouldn't have checked out otherwise, like the Scoobie Doo movie. They're giving you a great gift, it makes your life better. And that trust, therefore that gift, is only possible because of that person's [or that company's or that website's] character.

Of course, a guidepost to one person can be a warning sign to another. If somebody you consider a jerk had recommended the Scooby Doo movie, you would have moved it to an even danker place in your mental dungeon of movies not to see. But again, it was the person's character that tipped you off as to how to evaluate their input.

If Jack Nicholson or Sean Connery gets under your skin to where you can be happy watching them pick their noses, you'll go to any movie they're in. If you dig Woody Allen, same. If you hate him, you'll run screaming at a glimpse of his name in the credits. Penny Arcade web comics? Love 'em all, even the ones I haven't seen. Games by Blizzard or Ensemble? That's for me, maybe not you. If you think Einstein is the coolest guy ever to walk the Earth, are you going to spend your Web-browsing time losing yourself at the MIT "Fans of Feinman" website when you could be at the "Einstein Rockz" forum? Sonic Foundry: I partied with the founder, and he was a good guy, he really cared about his work, and he almost got a tattoo of my Fat Seal on his arm. I knew his company made good stuff and would continue to do so even after he passed the reigns to the next guy. And even though I've been disappointed a couple of times now, I'll still buy any audio editing software made by Sonic Foundry.

WHY?

Because each of these sources provides us with ways to make our information sorting choices. Each one exhibits the most valuable commodity of the information age-- personality; behaviors by which I can identify them as "my kind of company," "my kind of director," "my kind of guy," to the point where I have a feeling regarding what it is about them that I trust. Then, I use that to guide me in my Digital Media consumption decisions.

AND what happens, Dear Dude, when we put the green shoe on the other foot? If we ourselves decide to let our character show, to move a little bit away from hiding the flaws and quirks in our personalities, to try to be, within reason, a little more honest, and make it plain how we feel about the things that really matter to us?

Well, today I'm thinking that, to the extent that we do these things, we make ourselves available to our friends, to people we meet, to the entire world via the Web and e-mail, as personalities. And to that same extent it becomes possible for us to, consciously or not, in business or in personal life, provide the most valuable service that there is: information sorting. When we hold this power, we can use it to make money, or we can use it to help the World, if that’s where we're at.

And that, Dear Friends, is where the Metal hits the Meat.

One more illustration to drive the point home: in recent months I have heard more than one reporter friend of mine (nobody on O'Reilly!) say, essentially, "I'd like to say what I mean in the articles I write, Fat Man, but if I did it would be shooting my career in the foot. So I just toe the line and say what I need to say to keep the sponsors happy." Yeeesh.

My response?

"As a writer, how does it make you feel to know that I, your Fat Friend whom you respect, can never trust anything you write? To know that nobody can trust anything you write? Are you OK with that?"

And friends, I can only speculate based on my own experience, but when you start letting it all hang out just a little more, I think you're going to find that the shot in the green-shod foot becomes a shot in the arm. You might find that you are suddenly surrounded by the kind of people who you've always wanted to know, the kind who respect the same things you do. You might find that you're not just delivered from Information Hell, but you've found your way to a nice little Heaven.

When you let your interesting tastes show and put on the cowboy hat, you may find that you have become just a little more like your heroes, your Jack Nicholsons, your Einsteins and your Don Quixotes. And just a little less like the butt-heads who write Spam.