Hello, world.

I love thinking about Information. Capital I Information, as in Library and Information Studies, Information Technology, the Information Age, Informatics. I'm also intrigued by the lower-case kind - how we find information; how we use information to train, instruct and shape the world; the ways information is used, divulged, and wielded in power structures; and the transformation of information --> knowledge --> action. And so in this spirit of affection for information, I'm launching The Secret Life of Information to bring light to these thoughts.

To help tether these abstract ideas to earth, a few thoughts on the outset of this blog:

• I define Information broadly, as a concept, with frequent recurrence and application in everyday life. In the words of Wikipedia (accessed 4/26/2008): "Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation."
  
  
• Information, I believe, lives a secret life in that the immensity of the Internet and the aggregation of human knowledge over time is a Borges-esque labyrinth, unknowable in its sheer size. How can normal, everyday people navigate these meta-libraries to create meaningful lives, productive societies, just governments, and empowered communities? How can Information be made human-scale, and what technologies will we use to do it? I'm intrigued by online searching, tagging, linking, and efforts to digitize libraries; I'm hooked on concepts from social media to agile software design, and by the fantastic people, organizations, and ideas I encounter. I hope to highlight and aggregate those projects here.
  
  
• As a current practitioner in the nonprofit sector in the United States, I see the sector as the "information sector", and hope to lead and explore ways of shared, cooperative knowledge management for the intentional creation of communities. I see myself as a professional learner, aspiring librarian, educator and overall smarty pants. And what kind of smarty pants would I be if I wasn't online being smart?

So at the outset of this creative endeavor, some apropos whimsy from Cat and Girl.

-nicole