How can we objectively distinguish between the prose of a monkey's banging on a keyboard versus the poetry of Longfellow? Does a 30-minute 100-megabyte video of kittens playing with a ball of yarn truly contain a thousand times more information than the plain text of a highly intelligent book that takes up less than 0.1% of the same disk space on a computer? Or is there a metric which can more accurately compare the two? How should we measure for repetition and redundancy within a message? This article explores the concept of "significant distinction" as an objective measure of information which aligns closely with our intuition. Significance refers to the data's representation of something outside itself, such as a set of instructions for building a piece of functional equipment. Distinction refers to the degree to which the data is not internally redundant. The conjunction of the two attributes is the metric called significant distinction, or its information content under the definition here, when applied to data. Using the same principle, a reasonable method for inferring information from the functional complexity of the end product is given. It is then compared against other concepts, such as Shannon information, Kolmogorov complexity, specified complexity, and coded information systems theory. Possible applications are considered, including arguing for a young and specially created human genome