I am sleepless in Vienna. It’s like being Sleepless in Seattle, only less romantic. (Note to client: if I’m dimwitted tomorrow, this is why.) I arrived from Zurich in the dark of night and took a taxi to my hotel; of course this gave me well-informed opinions about Vienna which I shall proceed to share.

Vienna is ugly. And not only because of the twinkling oil refinery aside the highway as you drive from the airport into town (all the romance disappears upon seeing it as an oil company town.) It’s ugly like all cities that were bombed in World War II; it’s like our collective human ability to execute architecture had been annihilated with the atomic bomb. Say what you want about modern society—there’s much to applaud. We do almost everything better now—freedom, equality, commerce, technology. There’s only one thing that we obviously fail at—architecture.

Really, if you’re a city that came of age after World War II, there’s no hope of being architecturally significant (perhaps great architecture is dependent on slave labor.) Dubai (and Vegas) are nothing more than novelties&#8212after you say “wow” it’s the end of the relationship between you and the architect. There’s no conversation through history, no vestige of the past.

Architecture, it seems to me, is the singular thing in civil society that’s dependent on great masses of men believing in God, not money. Our greatest orators compare with our greatest preachers; our greatest storytellers can rival the bible; our greatest singers can almost compare to a choir in a Southern Baptist Chuch, but our greatest architects are as sporadic as natural disasters.

Namely: if roughly 50% of your city was destroyed in or antecedent to World War II, don’t even bother. The likelihood that you’ll have developed an architectural wonder after 1930 is slim to none.

Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power. —Michael Foot

Reading is fundamental, yet as one becomes more and more powerful there’s less and less time for it. Enter Bespoke Information. A personal trainer makes your workout more efficient—you hire them to push your boundaries. We do exactly the same thing, but with information: we’ll find the best content for you and even summarize it when appropriate.

You’d think that Bespoke Information is a product of the information age, and certainly the onslaught of information has made us more critical. But actually, we’re the modern incarnation of an age-old service: Renaissance and Enlightenment princes often had a person on staff, known as a “reader”, that actually read books for them and then briefed them on the contents.

I am in Zurich. Tomorrow we have a meeting at a major Swiss bank to discuss Bespoke Information writing a column in their monthly investor newsletter. Swiss banks are the only winners as of late. The market is rewarding them handsomely.

The image below is of a video installation seen airport gate people-mover. It’s an eerie sweet young Heidi who kisses you from outside the window.

Airports are displays of nationality. Perhaps the Swiss would rather be defined by a sweet young kissing Heidi, but what truly defines this nation is:

1. Banks
2. Watchmaking
3. Chocolate

It’s an interesting question to ask, the three things that matter most to the national soul. Russia is the easiest:

1. Vodka
2. Ballet
3. Diamonds

It’s America I have the hardest time with. Certainly not Apple Pie, Baseball, and Mom. Maybe:

1. Innovation
2. Branding
3. Redemption

What do you think are the three things that define the American soul?

There was an article about Obama’s information stream in the New York Times this morning:

He received a scaled-down list of news clippings, with his advisers wanting to keep him from reading blogs and news updates all day long, yet aides said he still seemed to hear about nearly everything in real time. A network of friends — some from college, others from Chicago and various chapters in his life — promised to keep him plugged in.

Not having such a ready line to that network, staff members who spent countless hours with him say, is likely to be a challenge. “Given how important it is for him to get unfiltered information from as many sources as possible, I can imagine he will miss that freedom,” said Linda Douglass, a senior adviser who traveled with the campaign.

Sounds like Obama should sign up for Bespoke Information. We’re exactly as described in the article—a network that gives you relevant yet unfiltered information from as many sources as possible. We free you from reading news and blogs all day long, after we’ve honed your service you’ll come to trust that if it’s relevant to you, we’ll get it to you. Then you can be the one forwarding the links.

If it’s a media trend, I assure you Michael Hedges thought of it first. He’s my new best friend after a breakfast in Geneva and one of the most interesting discussions I’ve had about the future of media. His website, Follow the Media, is a stunning example.

From the department of coincidences, he’d written earlier this year an article anticipating Bespoke Information. It’s below, reprinted with permission from Follow the Media (where it’s behind a subscriber’s wall.)

The Personal Journalist

Michael Hedges January 17, 2008

“Hi, I’m your personal journalist,” is coming to a device near you. Having what you want, when and where you want it is mantra in new media. Delivering the goods has been elusive, until now.

Try as we might, media keeps failing to find its next big thing. Business models don’t mesh with consumers. And technology is a separate universe. Demand is high and consumption is unpredictable. The solution is sitting, figuratively, right in front of you.

The technical architecture that changed the relationship between media and its listeners, viewers and readers has run into a brick wall. Actually, we should call it a gold wall because beyond it lies all the gold. Algorithms and gigantic processors can produce ‘favorites’ by crunching data from past behavior. But have you noticed that the results are never quite enough or never quite right?

Two of the biggest trends in service industries are the personal trainer and the personal shopper. Both fulfill, for those accepting, the need for expertise. Reading a book – on the couch with the TV on – about improving fitness motivates only until the program changes or the chips run out. Gym membership, another rising trend – particularly in January, satisfies the social need to say ‘I go to the gym’ but does very little for that extra three kilos of post-holiday joy. The personal trainer, however, listens to what you say, takes what she knows and says ‘You know, throwing the medicine ball for 10 minutes will help your energy level better than lifting weights.”

Every working parent, usually mothers, knows the shopping paradox. Having two school age children means 40 birthday parties a year, and a tiny gift for each. Then there are the family members. Then there is the grocery shopping. LeShop, an online shopping service in Switzerland, has tripled its turnover in three years and will come close to €100 million in 2008. Such services, becoming more available in Europe, work well for people who know what they want and need. Just point, click and enjoy.

For the more challenging and demanding, the personal shopper saves the day. Navigating scores of stores when time and ideas are short is an anxiety producer. Reduce that stress. Hire an expert.

Must the search for information, not to forget entertainment, be any different than finding broccoli or the strength to lift it?

Enter the personal journalist who welcomes you to each day saying, “What would you like to know today?”  Maybe it’s at their fingertips; a news item, a press release, analysis, podcast, video clip. Maybe your personal journalist needs a few hours to find everything you need to know about childrens television programs in Bulgaria. “Bob, I’ll be back to you with that tomorrow morning.”

The personal journalist is a wave or two beyond the tried and busted ‘user-generated content’ and ‘citizen journalist.’ Neither found a business model. Citizen journalism, a term invented by accountants, past its prime when listeners, viewers and readers lost interest in ‘reports’ from the 16 year old on the corner with a cell-phone camera. Blogs, touted as giving voice to many, became, largely, ranters ranting to themselves or PR people posting the daily spin. Blog creation has peaked, wrote the Pew Research Center in a 2007 report. The successful became niche publishers, albeit of the traditional media model. The rest are just out there, hanging by the Web.

User-generated content is another concept designed to warm the accountants’ books. Couple it with the much vaunted social networking sites and zillions of web hits are created. All content may, indeed, be equal for 20 year old user/creators but an adult looking for knowledge and clarity is left empty. Unfortunately, sources for adults have evaporated into the dither of click-through ads.

Imagine a typical appointment with the personal journalist. Busy humans, executives in their own right, need to acquire knowledge efficiently. While an executive might be buried in reports and analysis and numbed by 15 news channels, the personal journalist answers the need by asking the right questions, getting the story and delivering it in 750 words, voice or text, to the device of choice. Is it worth €75 a hour - the rate personal trainers charge – to avoid the 3 hours sifting through 250,000 search engine results, only 2 of which might yield a shred of knowledge?

The personal journalist does, in fact, do what journalists do best: keep their eyes open. In addition to providing the news you need, the personal journalist brings serendipity to the day. What a joy it would be to have that concise ‘news for you’ mixed with the occasional ‘…and think about this.’ And best of all, the personal journalist is ‘on and gone.’ No promos. No pop-up ads.

Media in the 21st century is buckling under the empowerment of users to get the information and entertainment they want, whenever and however they want it. The next step in that empowerment provides both clarity and expertise with greater sensitivity to time economy. Sad for some, technology will take a smaller role.

Of course, you might want to share your personal journalist with others. What might that be called?

A question I’m occasionally asked by prospective clients is, “How can you be better than Google?”

I can’t help but laugh at the paradox: typically, our clients’ experiences and curiosity have given them a worldview of expansive, epic proportions; at the same time, experiencing only Google has cause their informational worldview to shrink. They equate Google with the informational universe when it’s really more like a small town in Idaho. Worse, there’s a tad of “flat world” syndrome about the question—if it’s not on Google then it must not exist.

Facts and figures don’t help. Sure, we have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of subscription databases, we have a worldwide network of researchers and experts to utilize, we make extensive use of print and live sources, we have sophisticated technology, and anyway, we also use Google. Still, they scoff.

You’ve got to show them.

But we’re a start-up. We don’t have the marketing budget to convince flat-world believers that the world is actually round. So I use a technique that I first came to adore when I worked in Washington DC, a technique that I found made conversations with lobbyists bearable, and if not bearable, then at least profitable.

I bet them.

A bet is a fantastic rhetorical device. First, you get to see how much someone actually believes their own view. Second, you have to agree on how you’ll measure who wins; you have do decide on how you’ll agree what’s true. Third, the person who is right is rewarded for their efforts, and any society worth its salt rewards truth. Fourth, there’s nothing like a little economic pain to make a lesson settle. Finally, a friendly competition is much more fun than a sales pitch.

So, I say, “Let’s make a bet.” He picks a topic, and uses Google. I use our methods. We compare the results and see who wins.

It’s fun, not to mention it’s made our marketing department actually profitable. Not bad for a start-up.

If you think a Google search returns the best information, it displays how narrow your world is more than anything else. You have to have some concept of the potential results in order to measure against.

I assure you, there’s a world of information outside Google, a world of information that Google can’t access. This is what we give our clients.

Above is a graphic from a briefing Bespoke Information gave to a client in Tokyo. (It’s shared with permission, of course.) The report, among other things, was about communications technologies commonly used in Silicon Valley. This graphic helped illustrate an index of features found in communications technologies.

Andrew (our Lead Information Designer) and I spent lots of time on this graphic: we couldn’t get it right. We first tried it as a Venn Diagram, but it was way too complicated for that. We debated. We tried some other things, and came to the conclusion that it was perhaps information that couldn’t be made more useful with a graphic. I didn’t seem to like that conclusion, since afterward I stayed up all night trying out various radial charts. That version didn’t seem to illuminate anything about our data either. So it sat as a background process, irritating me.

I spent the weekend before the briefing at the amazing Benesse House, on Naoshima Island, off the coast of Japan, looking at Soichiro Fukutake’s world-class contemporary art collection. The island inspired in me the desire to again try and unleash the power of the visual. On the way back to Tokyo on the train, I opened my computer, determined to finish this graphic.

I decided I’d represent the features as thin red veins running through the grid of features. I was thinking about the Latin root of corporation, corpus, which means body. The name is meant to evoke the fundamental meaning of a corporation; it is a group of bodies joined, through a legal fiction, into a single body: the corporate entity. (In the United States, corporations even have the Constitutional rights of an individual.) I was thinking how the body of a corporation is shaped by the way that communication flows through its flesh. The beautiful illustration of veins flowing through a body was done by Catherine Ford.

Still, I thought my graphic was more beautiful than useful. (And still not nearly as beautiful as Catherine Ford’s.) We have a higher standard for information graphics here at Bespoke Information.

In the back of the taxi, on my way over to the briefing, I opened up my computer just to berate myself again over my graphic’s failure. Then I noticed something. There was a strange white gap hovering in the space between public and private. Why?

I looked again:

Then I realized. Of course. I’d forgotten Facebook. It was in the report, but I’d mistakenly left it out of this version of the graphic.

I was elated! The graphic meant something! (A good information graphic will make you see something that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. That’s exactly the standard for information graphics we have here at Bespoke Information.)

The graphic shows, I think, the evolutionary nature of our rapidly-evolving communications technologies. As soon as there’s a white space on the chart, an empty bit of flesh in the feature-set, a new company will arise, almost instantly, with a specialized communications tool to bring blood into the pale flesh.

Of course, I still berate myself over the graphic, because my rankings of each technology on the feature scale lacked rigor. It was more impressionistic than anything else. Many of the technologies can be used in various ways, although they’re all optimized for a certain use, and I never figured out how to rigorously represent this.

Which is why, of course, I’m posting it. I hope that another client will find it fascinating enough to commission version 2.0 which will introduce a standardized way to map the technologies. It could be a useful diagram to use in developing new communications tools, or it could provide a basis for mapping how information flows through your corporation and what that means.

Or something else. Most of the time, our clients come up with the most amazing uses of the information we produce for them, things we couldn’t even imagine. That’s the best part of our job.

I had dinner last night seeped in the history of Silicon Valley—if an event only years ago can count as history. In the 1980’s Carver Mead and Dick Merrill had a series of world-changing conversations at the Lion & Compass.

Last night I had macadamia nut encrusted halibut. Delicious, yes, but I barely touched it I was so inthralled with the conversation. A conversation I could tell you all about if we had dinner too, but I may not write about.

Journalists must explode with what’s off the record. Namely, all the most interesting material.

I’ve always wondered about journalists. They are some of the smartest people I know, yet remain dedicated to a job where there’s little money to what they certainly could make outside of the trade. (Though Of Record, Bespoke Information’s parent company, is intent on changing this.)

I used to think it was altruism, since democracy would certainly crumble without them. But now I understand the vast personal pleasure: it’s access to these off the record conversations. Journalists only write the slightest bit of what they know; they’ve access to information you couldn’t even imagine.

There’s an entire layer of information that’s not secret, yet can’t be printed. Bespoke Information gives our clients access to this layer of information.

Americans do care about policy!

We’ve received so many thoughtful comments and sweet thank you’s since releasing our comprehensive chart comparing Obama and McCain’s policy positions. A lot of them were about issues that should be added. Please, don’t just complain: do something!

If one of the candidates has stated a policy position on an issue, then it should be on our chart.

Find the material for us, email it to us, and we’ll add it to the chart. Here are guidelines to assure it’s in the most useful format.

• It needs to be a specific policy position. For example, don’t send us the candidates’ position on “education”—that’s too general. It needs to be a specific policy manifestation, such as “school vouchers”.
• Compare like policies. For example, if you send us a link saying McCain supports school vouchers, then also send us Obama’s position on that issue. Don’t say “Obama supports no child left behind.” If the opposing candidate hasn’t taken a stance on the issue, send us a link to source stating so, or the candidate’s website where the issue position should have been.
• Send links to a credible citation. Don’t just tell us McCain or Obama take a certain position—we need links to a credible online source stating that it’s indeed the accurate position.

Send additions or updates to editor@ofrecord.com. Also, if you’d like us to link to your website as a thank you, let us know.

Thank you for all your help.

In the volumes of campaign coverage, the most basic information still didn’t exist: a table to enable meaningful comparisons between the candidates’ positions on every major issue.

We made one for Ted Leonsis, the inventor of filmanthropy, sports-team owner, and a long-time AOL executive. He is today’s news hero for sharing it with you—this small miracle of information needed for those who want to vote because of policy positions as opposed to the candidate’s tie colors.