Paying Attention to Real Life

In the last couple of weeks we have had a number of things in our real and non-touchstone related lives that have interfered with our ability to be very productive. It's an unfortunate reality that these things happen. As a result, we have been delayed on delivering the next build for Alpha Testing.

We promise to get back on track as soon as possible and get everyone a copy as soon as we can tidy up the last few loose ends.

Sorry for the delay guys - feel free to poke fun.

What are your Intentions with my Attention?

Phil Windley posted last month about the concept of 'Intention' and it's place in the Attention discussion.

He mentions how Doc Searls describes Intention as 'the buy side of the Attention Economy'.

If Attention is all about sell-side, then intention is about buyers (the folks with the money) describing what it is that they want to pay attention to.

This discussion has crystallized another sponsoring thought for Touchstone that I've had floating around in the back of my mind.

Once our Attention Data is stored in a standardized way (OPML or Attention.xml or as part of what we call your 'I-AM Profile') then you need tools to start acting on it. Companies, I'm sure, will find plenty of ways to capitalize on the information for their own up-selling and cross-selling purposes, but I am more interested in personal tools that put the power back in a user's hands... in my hands.

Think of it as stored potential. The next generation of Attention or Intention tools will need to deliver value on that data by, in Touchstone's case, creating a model for what you care about to give you a filtered heads-up-display while you work.

Other value might be derived through recommendation systems, watch lists, targeted advertising etc.

So let me summarize all this as it stands now for my own purposes and see if I have it right (if not feel free to let me know!)

All these words, Intention, Gestures, Attention - they are just different parts of the same problem domain. A problem that has two separate user groups.

Group A wants your time to pitch a deal, and your money for their bottom line.

Group B wants more time and better information to make buying and living decisions.

Attention Data is a profile of what you care about (in our case based on implicit and explicit historic information that we get from the user).

Gestures are part of an Attention Profile (as far as I'm concerned anyway) but include more subtle information. I really think that gestures should somehow be stored right along with your other Attention Data and for Touchstone I think they will.

For example, whereas a click-stream only provides a list of links that a user has visited, gestures suggest the reasons for those clicks - maybe the user hated the site they visited and never wants to see that sort of information again.

Intentions, unlike Attention Data, are indications of future interest by a user. They might be determined by what a user has done (their Attention Data) and is doing (I'm at work right now) combined with some sort of implicit predictive model or explicit tuning interface.

Seth Goldstien calls 'Intentions' a 'Promise to Pay Attention' or PPA.

Right?

Attention Seeking

Isaac Garcia from Central Desktop sent me a great article about collecting and trading attention as championed by Seth Goldstein's Attention Trust and Root Markets.

Seeking Attention
"Measuring exactly who's looking at what and for how long, some experts say, is the Web's new gold."

Haven spoken to Seth about his views on Attention, I can tell you that he has some fascinating insights into how it all fits together. I encourage you all to read the article and see what the thought leaders are saying.

I hope to work more closely with both Isaac and Seth in converting all this attention information into a practical tool for helping a user stay informed while they work.

Thanks for the link Isaac!

Being emo about Touchstone

For those of you who have followed this blog for a while, you will know that sometimes I just post silly things to amuse myself in between being productive... it's my way of staying motivated. So here is my latest round of silliness. Feel free to use them if you think they might come in handy for whatever reason.

Email - Still the King of Collaboration

The guys at "Central Desktop" have a great post on their blog about email and it's unwillingness to die as the collaboration tool of choice for most mainstream users.

The post (rightly) suggests, we still live in our inbox and any collaboration software that hopes to truly integrate into our workflow must start there. As they point out, email has the client-side immediacy of alerts and self-determined relevance that other applications don't offer.

Perhaps Touchstone might go some way to help free us from the inbox and give web-based software the power to reach the user outside of the mailbox.

Or perhaps Touchstone might help un-clutter the inbox by routing mail through its relevancy engine first.

I particularly like the last paragraph:

Am I suggesting that we all abandon our collaboration dreams and submit to email? Absolutely not. As a fellow collaboration software vendor, though, I think we've got our work cut out ahead of us. Mass adoption isn't around the corner. In order for any of us to succeed beyond the outer rings of the blogosphere, we must look closely at the single most successful medium to enter the business world in 25 years. We must take a closer look at this killer app and apply the same rules of simplicity and ease-of-use to our own products if we ever expect to become more than a cottage industry. To succeed, we must look back and learn and apply what we've come to understand as the Good In Email.

Read more at the Central Desktop blog.

Seattle Mind Camp 2.0

It's on - April 29th to 30th 2006. I wish we lived in the states... Would make things more fun and interesting. Register here

Getting Plugged in

The alpha requests for the next round of testing are streaming in (now a list of many hundreds) and since Chris and I have had a good night’s sleep for the first time in a long while, it seems appropriate that I share with you folks what’s happened over the past several days. I guess you could say we've been inspired by Leeroy Jenkins.

The last release of Touchstone was pretty much a proof of concept. A one piece application that read RSS feed items, processed them and displayed them in a news ticker. Not very exciting.

This new version will introduce key architectural pieces that will make it possible for 3rd parties to develop input and output adapters for the Attention Management Engine.

Already we have received SDK requests from early adopters who get our approach in a way that has surprised and delighted us. They understand the potential of connecting multiple data sources with multiple outputs using a caching and relevance power plant in the middle.

Sure, out-of-the-box we will have the Feed Reader and a News Ticker and a System Tray alert and maybe even a Cursor Trail alert... but the real innovation begins when our development friends get their hands on the SDK.

While I work on finishing off all this low-level under-the-covers stuff, Chris has been working on polishing the interface. This new version of Touchstone will feel like a more professional application ready for prime time.

It really is true... 20% of the work takes 80% of the time.

Stay tuned for more...

Am I Being Heard?

I used to run an interactive net radio show called 'radioactive'. This was long before the days of podcasting when broadcasting audio over the net was a novel idea.

The key to it all was the slogan and philosophy 'Don't just listen, be heard'. The idea being that the audience was so involved in the live broadcast (both on traditional terrestrial radio and simulcast on the net) via forums, chat rooms and voting polls etc that their interactions had a significant effect on the live show (in real-time).

This slogan spoke to a fundamental human need that I think podcasting, blogging and all forms of social/citizen journalism speaks to... the need to be heard.

People just want to feel connected and understood. Why else would people check their traffic stats and blog comments like cocaine addicts (hide's head in shame).

But beyond our personal and very human need to be heard... writing our experiences down allows us to preserve history and learn from our past. And with all the new-fangled conversation tracking technologies... it allows us to get a great sense of our collective thoughts at any given time.

I found an interesting quote about all this via Signal vs Noise and I thought I would share.

Mark Ostroth 29 Mar 06Don’t glaze over Don Norman’s point about writing. This is right out of a 1960 essay by Loren Eisley, titled The Long Loneliness:

“Man without writing cannot long retain his history in his head. His intelligence permits him to grasp some kind of succession of generations; but without writing, the tale of the past rapidly degenerates into fumbling myth and fable. Man’s greatest epic, his four long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers, has vanished from human memory without a trace.”

“Writing, and later printing, is the product of our adaptable many-purposed hands. It is thus, through writing, with no increase in genetic, inborn capacity since the last ice advance, that modern man carries in his mind the intellectual triumphs of all his predecessors who were able to inscribe their thoughts for posterity.”

So blog on my friends... the world is listening.

The loss of context and original intent

As part of the development process for Touchstone Ash and I take much needed breaks by watching the best of television entertainment. And without a doubt, one of the best TV shows ever made is the West Wing.

This show demonstrates the wonder that occurs when the right intentions meet the right circumstances and get executed by the right balance of technical and creative genius.

I am going to go into spoiler territory here (season 7 episodes) to discuss how the West Wing relates to RSS/Syndication of content (you have been warned).

As those of you watching know, a number of key things have occurred in the West Wing over the years (as you would expect). Two specifically relevant for this post are:

1. Aaron Sorkin (the genius creator) left/was fired in season 3.
   
   
2. In the latest episode - as of posting - a long running unrequited love (in the form of the Josh and Donna relationship) was finally consummated.

The scenes were strange to watch because they didn't quite happen as I had expected. But it led me to wonder... did they happen as the original creator had envisaged?

This is a question that has occurred to me from time to time because it also relates to loss of control when a company or project gets too big for the original creators to reasonably maintain control of all the moving parts.

By extension it makes you wonder... how is it possible to maintain a creators/publishers/authors intent when they loose control of their content (perhaps when they are no longer involved in the project).

Extrapolating further, is it possible to maintain the full meaning of a piece of content when it becomes divorced from its container (as RSS does).

Do we really understand the implications of an article when it has been broken apart from most of its 'neighbors' and divorced of the packaging and, unless we pay close attention, from our awareness of the Author's bias and perspective?

Does RSS begin to dilute the value of content because the author looses a measure of control and the reader looses a measure of perspective?

Can consumption tools help bring that context back by digging up related articles and information and putting it in the margins? Is this sort of context better or worse than having seen the content in the original container?

Touchstone Aquired by Google

We would like to announce that we have been acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum. Larry and Sergey have promised that they will keep our original vision intact, except that they will now only support a proprietary RSS-derived format designed by Google (GSS).

This deal will allow us to tap into Google's secret network of spies and assassins to ensure that we can gather intelligence on your interests, and punish kill people who waste your attention.

The people at Google assure us that RSS will soon become redundant as GSS will take over the world with its search powered, keyword filtered, mapping based content distribution.

We are off to the Bahamas for some much needed rest.

Happy April 1st.

By the way, Scoble is moving to Google as well so maybe we will get to meet him over a free lunch. Maybe Alex will wise up and join us.

The Cost of Coming First

I just opened Visual Studio 2005 and started another “new project” for the 11th time just now. Chris doesn’t like it when I break the stable build to experiement on that "next killer feature”.

I guess the realisation of being a class apart in terms of Attention Management Processing means that we don’t have much reference material to copy mimic from others doing the same thing.

Research and Development (or as Chris and I have come to call it: “How the ***k do we do THAT!") is something we have both enjoyed.

Now I suppose I need to store them somewhere in the SVN.