Shannon was especially clear that he didn't mean meaning:
Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are
correlated according to some system with certain physical or
conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are
irrelevant to the engineering problem.
In
The Mathematical Theory of Communication, he and
Weaver explained
that "information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one
selects a message" from a universe of possible solutions. In everyday
usage, "freedom" and "choice" are usually seen as desirable: the more,
the better. However, in trying to decipher a message they have a
different consequence: the more freedom of choice one has, the more
ways one can render the message - and the less sure one can be that a
particular reproduction is accurate.
Put simply, the more freedom one has, the less one "knows."
-- Ted Byfield.
"A Brief History of Information:
The word that means everything - and nothing."
The Register (January 2, 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/02/wtf_is_information_part1/page2.html