As PR for an upcoming appearance by James Gleick, whose new book The Information I am greatly looking forward to reading, Zocalo Public Square asked four or five folks “Can there be too much information?” It’s an interesting collection of responses. (Well, mine excepted.)

And underneath these interesting-in-themselves essays runs a different question when they are taken together: What the heck do we mean by “information” anyway? I’m not sure any of the respondents is defining it in the same way. The ways include: opinions, raw data, words, ideas, photos, switches and dials, and books. Of course, some of these are containers of information or examples of information. But they do not reduce to a single definition. (I believe Gleick’s book is at least in part about this ambiguity about information. It’s also something I’ve been researching for the past couple of years.)

As far as my contribution goes, I had to decide whether to provide an Everything Is Miscellaneous answer (we are learning to organize info in new ways) or a Too Big to Know answer (the quantity of info is changing the nature of knowledge). I went with the new book rather than the old, if only because I wrote the tiny essay within minutes after finishing revising the book manuscript.

According to an article in Science Insider by Dennis Normile, a group formed at a symposium sponsored by the Board on Global Science and Technology, of the National Research Council, an arm of the U.S. National Academies [that’s all they’ve got??] is proposing making it easier to find big scientific data sets by using a standard tag, along with a standard way of conveying the basic info about the nature of the set, and its terms of use. “The group hopes to come up with a protocol within a year that researchers creating large data sets will voluntarily adopt. The group may also seek the endorsement of the Internet Engineering Task Force…”