I don't think we've paid enough attention to either one, even though we use the terms every day. This lets us conceive it as something we can ship. We can packetize it, move it, open or restrict access to it. We can treat it as property. These are industrial concepts that deny the nature at information's deepest roots, which is the power to form, to author , another human being.
Authority is cleaner.
It is authority, perhaps even more than information, that increases in value the more widely it becomes known. When we grant authority to other people, we give them the right to form what we know, and who we are. Since I wrote the last line of the item below, I have starting to like calling unlinkable pages bogs . Against the grain of the Web. A sand trap among the golf links of cyberspace.