Ash’s Theory of Progressional Persistence

There is a common problem amongst any program that generates any kind of alert. It’s quite a significant problem too because while I might have configured Outlook or FeedDemon to show popup (“toast”) alerts, if I have happened to turn around to talk-to or help a co-worker, then yep, there goes my important alert.

Who knows, my wife may have had a baby and I wouldn’t even know about it! ;)

Seriously, it’s a problem. At work, like most people I don’t just sit in front of my workstation without blinking and I am tired of missing things while I happen to be elsewhere, possibly reducing the security permissions for staff on the network.

Similarly, you can’t just throw stuff to the user’s screen and leave it there. A user’s desktop is a sacred place, and you can’t go about just leaving your shit lying around where you like. That type of annoying behaviour is what we call an “Uninstallable Offence”.

Missing alerts is a problem - one that Touchstone is guilty of too.

But this will soon change. Because I feel that whether or not an alert should persist is directly relative to how important the item is to a user. If the importance of the item is inside the top 25% of the threshold for that output adapter, then the alert should persist (at least our alerts will). Of course there will be an option to turn that off.

I will try to implement it over the next few builds.

The head wagging the tail

The mainstream is using the long-tail to create buzz and further drive the impact of 'big hits'. It just goes to show that, at the end of the day, the head and the tail must live together - or neither will be very exciting at all (try shaking your tail without involving your head/brain).

Yet another example of this trend is the producers of lost using the lost website to distribute fragments - fragments that YouTube users have taken it upon themselves to assemble.

Read more about it at TVSquad 'Joined clips from Hanso Exposed - VIDEO'.

Perhaps the long tail does not mean the end of the hit, just a better quality mainstream product supported by many, many niche creations as well.

New build of Touchstone has been published!

Hey all, here was the official email:

Touchstone Alpha Testing Invite
Subscribe to information that matters, set rules for what's important and keep track of your news and alerts in one all-purpose heads-up-display

The latest version of Touchstone is available for download and we'd like to invite you to participate in testing and providing feedback.

• What is Touchstone - Read the Manifesto
• Where do I get a Copy - Download Here
• How do I provide feedback - On the forums
• Want to win an XBOX 360 - Develop an adapter
  

Download Touchstone here

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas on the forums or by return email.

Kind regards,

The Touchstone Team

The annoying thing is, however, that Gmail and Outlook 2007 seems to be junking the invites as spam. So if you didn't get your invite, then please download the app from the link above and just use the email address you subscribed to the mailing list with.

Didn't subscribe to the mailing list? Then you can download the app - but you won't be able to get past the first screen - email me for an invite.

This spam problem is driving me nuts! Anyone have any ideas how to get past the filters?

What is Attention Data? A description for Mom and Dad.

With Touchstone we focus less on Attention Data and more on creating an Attention Profile. What's the difference? Attention Data is all the breadcrumbs you leave behind when you interact with your computer (and your life) while your Attention Profile is the resulting 'boiled down' profile of your interests.

But it never hurts to get an understanding of what Attention Data is in the first place. The first stop should be our manifesto.

Also, there is a great post that has a simple explanation of Attention Data for your Mom and Dad - What is Attention Data.

Of course, Attention Data and Attention Profiles are useless unless you can apply them to something useful.

Via SemifiktiveHalbwahrheiten

People powered news - Done

According to Alan Gray at News Blaze the battle for the People Powered news business (ala Digg) is over. There are 5 top players and many of the rest are dead or dieing.

I'm not sure I agree or disagree with the statement. I do know, however, that aggregating a collective picture of popularity for news (whether it is done by votes like Digg, or by incoming links and meme tracking like tailrank and techmeme) is only part of the solution. An import part, but not the whole picture.

While we all want to know what the 'next big thing' is (or in Digg's case what the 'current big thing is - at least for the next 5 minutes'), we also want to know what's of most interest to the most important person of all - ourselves.

As I said in my previous post - and many times before - there is "What's popular", and then there is "What's Personally Relevant". I think they are both important problems to tackle however in the rush to create 'me too' services, "What's Personally Relevant" is being overlooked.

With Publishing 2.0 creating massive amounts of content about every imaginable topic - from my local golf club to world wide industry trends, we need to find a way to generate a view of world-wide content that is specifically tailored to our tastes and needs.

I'd like to see an RSS feed of items that I care about. Personally. Me. Not everyone else... not my social network... me.

Obviously Touchstone is making great strides in this direction. We even (optionally) syndicate the results back out to your very own RSS feed. We call it Pebbles. It's coming in the next build of Touchstone.

Why aren't you paying enough attention to me ;(

Nick Carr has recently posted about the 'great unread'. The basic premise is that the blog A-list are turning into a force not unlike the old-media whereby they 'own' the readership and the rest of the blogs don't really count.

He has it wrong. Putting aside fundamental facts such as:

1. Blogging is about joining an open, two-way conversation. Old-media would never have allowed such a thing.
2. As Michael Arrington says "those people with interesting things to say tend to get listened to. Those that don’t…don’t"
3. As Shel says "At no point and in no space is there some Committee of the Anointed A-List sitting in a top down boardroom deciding who should link and who should be linked to"
   

There is a better, more compelling reason why the size of your audience and a blog's place in the 'A-List' is irrelevant (in broad terms).

Blogging is not about superstars; it's about individuals. It's the long tail of publishing. The top 100 is less important than the top 1 million - or more.

People and companies around the world start blogging not to get on the A-list, but rather to say something to their immediate audience. Even if that is an audience of one.

'Most Readers' will never beat 'Most personally relevant'. My local school's blog has more relevance to me than the A-list blog about schooling hosted by a stranger on the other side of the world.

When content is structured the way that blogging+rss has structured it, particpants (what used to be called 'the audience') get a chance to have a voice right alongside both the old-media and the A-list.

Ultimately the goal of blogging should be that participants can find content that is not just popular, but most personally relevant.

Update: Stowe takes the most balanced view so far with "A house divided against itself cannot stand... or can it?".

Blogging vs. Business

With so much time being spent on business development for Touchstone, the blog has been a little neglected. But there is lots of good news.

We are making moves to make the company stronger, and we now have a firm internal roadmap for public beta and then gold.

Now I just need to wait for a few things to be locked in before I can post specific details.

The competition has been going strong with submissions really showing the diversity of what can be done with an Attention Management Platform. It has been fun collaborating with each of the developers. If you have not yet started sending in your prototypes and ideas then you better get a move on - longer you leave it the harder it will be to catch up!

Chris' Personal Site

Hey guys - just a quick note to mention that I have decided to spend a little more time on my personal site as well.

I have turned it into a straight blog (on wordpress) so I can post off-topic thoughts and ideas as well as more personal musings about business and technology that might not directly relate to Touchstone.

You can find it at www.chrissaad.com

Making the right choices

In the past on this blog I have generally stuck to attention and software related issues because that's what was on my mind! But our intention has always been to cover all the ins-and-outs of this journey to create Touchstone.

As most of you know we have been getting lots of the right kind of 'Attention' (pun intended) lately and the business side of things has switched gears from 'finding ways to fund development' to 'choosing the right opportunities'.

It has been an interesting change. In these times you stop sending emails out and start trying to keep up with incoming emails. You stop hoping that an offer will come in and start having to decide which offer to select and who to trust with your future.

I always thought this would be a nerve wracking experience but I have discovered recently that when stuff starts to explode (in a good way) I seem to a very calm place where I let it all wash over me.

Making the right decisions has been and will be challenging - and having the right people to help will be key.

It has been a fun ride so far - will be interesting to see what comes next. I will try to keep you posted.

What's on the radio right now?

Just a quick note about a great site I saw via LifeHacker (actually Touchstone alerted me to the post on LifeHacker hah).

www.yes.com

It's a simple and stylish example of aggregated data visualized well.

It seems they have a custom toolbar for telling you what is playing on the radio. Perhaps they might be interested in making a Touchstone Input Adapter.

Touchstone Security and Privacy Policy

Ashley and I, as the two co-founders of Touchstone, have always had a policy that the user's privacy is of utmost importance to us. Touchstone's goal is to become one of those indispensible tools that you always download just after you do a clean install or set up your neighbors PC.

So with this in mind, we have always gone to great lengths to make sure that any features that impact personal privacy have an off-switch or explicitly inform the user of their rights and the intended behavior of the app.

We have also always had a Privacy Policy linked from inside the program. Today, however, I have updated it in anticipation of the next build's release.

You can find it here.

My favorite part is this:

Further, Touchstone's Attention Profile is stored in a human readable, documented format called 'IAM'. Your IAM file is located in your Touchstone installation folder in case you wish to see exactly what has been saved or use this file with supported 3rd-party sites and services.

I wonder if other sites and services can say the same?

This page will be linked from the download page, the alpha download page and inside Touchstone itself.

This is still in draft form so feel free to email me any questions or comments for inclusion.

Attention Landscape: Personal Relevancy for Alerting

Another in a series of articles I'm calling 'Attention Landscape'.

Applications of Personal Relevancy for Alerting
Tuning out the noise with Measured Disruption

With information reaching saturation point, time is the scarcest resource of our generation. The only way to better use our available time therefore, is to find ways to hyper-efficiently allocate our attention.

The best most pervasive example of hyper-efficient allocation of attention by a product or service has been Google. Google can determine your ‘current’ interests based on the keywords you type into their search box to deliver information matching your current focus of attention with uncanny accuracy. This type of attention might be called ‘Current Attention’.

The next challenge, however, is to allocate ones attention to information that may not be of current interest, but rather of ongoing or general interests to a user during their daily lives.

This type of attention might be called Ambient or Passive Attention.

Allocating Ambient Attention should be based on the ongoing interests of the user, the task their performing and the level of disruption the given piece of information deserves based on its personal relevancy (taking into account their level of interest and workload).

With this in mind, there are four technology challenges in the provision of Ambient Attention Management.

1. Personal recommendations
2. Task or activity based recommendations
3. Personal Relevancy
4. Measured disruption (Providing information in a way that reflects its immediate relevance)

Personal Recommendations
Information such as breaking news about world events that affect you, entertainment that interests you, people that are close to you and events that require your attention are all part of your ongoing interests.

In this case, what’s needed is a model of your previous articles of interest so that similar information can be crawled and recommend based on common themes and topics.

This type of approach has been built into services like Findory and Rojo and goes some way to collecting a broad range of content that is generally relevant to your interests and presenting it on the screen in a customized newspaper.

Task or activity based recommendations
While personal recommendations take into account what a user is generally interested in to find similar information that might be relevant, Task or Activity based recommendations consider what a user is currently doing to make recommendations for content that is relevant. Are they writing a document about Tree Frogs? Perhaps they would like to know all relevant research, statistics and news about Tree frogs?

This type of service would go some way to helping knowledge workers gather a context sensitive periphery view to their current work that might include previous resources from the corporate intranet, online research and statistics or even just images to pretty up their report.

Besides one or two low profile examples, this opportunity is largely untapped in the marketplace.

Personal Relevancy
While Personal Recommendations finds additional information that might be relevant to you personally. Task/Activity based recommendations finds information that is relevant to the task you are currently performing. Personal Relevancy is about determining the exact value of information to you at this very instant.

A Personal Relevancy algorithm should boil a number of factors down into a number that can be plotted along a fixed continuum from least relevant to most relevant. By plotting an item’s Personal Relevance against a know range, the user and/or a software agent can make intelligent decisions about the presentation of that item in order to maximize their time.

Measured Disruption
Explicitly subscribing to information you care about (E.g. RSS feeds), Personal Recommendations and Task/Activity based recommendations all converge to create a subset of the world that may interest you to one degree or another. The challenge remains, however, to find a way to consume this information in a way that allows you to maximize the time in the day. It would be simply impossible to keep track of all the information you care about if you were to stop and read every article about every topic related to your interests and activities.

Measured Disruption is about finding an approach to information delivery that consumes only the level of attention it deserves - in most cases it should be possible to provide information while you are performing other tasks.

This is achieved by taking a Personal Relevancy value and using it to make a presentation decision.

Is it background noise? Perhaps it should only form part of a passive backdrop (i.e. scrolling across a news ticker). Perhaps it is informative and deserves display on the bottom right of the screen so you can glance at it if you’re free. Perhaps it is time-sensitive and should follow your mouse around for a few seconds to make sure it catches your eye. Perhaps it is mission critical and requires your full attention and interaction.

In this way, Measured Disruption is about intelligently differentiating incoming information and presenting it in a full spectrum of attention appropriate formats.

This type of Attention Allocation is at the heart of the Touchstone Attention Management Platform. Its input adapters collect information from various sources (that could include explicit subscriptions, personal recommendations and activity based recommendations). Its Personal Relevancy Engine determines the level of importance of each item, and it invokes the right output adapter(s) for presenting the information to the user. Presentation styles vary based on the importance of the information.

Email sucks - False Positives

As many of you will know I had a little problem with Outlook 2007's spam filtering a little while back. It was too good in terms of keeping the spam out of my mailbox. It left me feeling out of touch with the passing of time - sort of like how you can tolerate high speeds in an elevator because you can't see outside. Does that make any sense?

But now I am going to say that Outlook 2007's spam filter is crap. Why? Well for a couple reasons.

1. It junks our invites for Touchstone. Ok maybe that might be excused. Maybe their poorly designed and maybe they are generated by a machine and hold some markers that attest to that fact but...

2. Since our recent TechCrunch review, my mailbox has been overflowing (more than usual) with real emails from real people with real opportunities or things to say to me. The problem though, is that more than a few of them have ended up in my Junk Email folder placed there by Outlook 2007's spam detection (btw if I have not responded to your email then please try again - it might have been spam filtered)!

Now sure, maybe I can put the sensitivity level down, but at the end of the day - when do we say that a system has failed? At what noise/signal ratio should we all decide to change technologies?

These days I ask most people to add me to Skype so that I can have less noise, more conversation and a better understanding of their timezone (sucks being in the southern hemisphere sometimes).

So can we declare email broken yet? Please?

Attention Landscape: Syndicated Value

Over the last few days and weeks I have been working on updating our Business Plan so that our partners and investors can get a detailed picture of our plans. As part of this document I am creating a series of articles that explain the changing media and technology landscape to those who might not follow it as closley as I do.

I will publish some of these over the next few days to see if anyone has any comments - I'd love to hear what you think!

I will call this series of posts 'Attention Landscape'.

Syndicated Value
Shifting value propositions in a changing media landscape

For publishers, the value of syndication is clear. Reach. The ability to reach users on their own terms and push (in perception terms, not technical terms) content into their preferred formats.

The value proposition for readers/listeners/viewers (for the sake of discussion lets just call them consumers), however, is far more subtle, complex and rewarding.

Discover
When content is syndicated it is necessarily placed in a structured format. Structured formats mean computers are able to better index, classify and search the information in order to help consumers discover the information that exactly matches their interests.

What’s more interesting, though, is that while consumers may choose to subscribe to a source they know and trust (i.e. CNN, TechCrunch or John Doe’s blog) they may also choose to discover individual posts that interest them from across a broad spectrum of sources without ever subscribing to any one of them.

Consume
In the past, consumption was limited to a single platform on a time limited basis. TV shows were on a specific channel, at a specific time. Missed it? Too bad (except for the re-runs of course). With syndicated content the consumption model changes dramatically.

Individual, self contained works exist free from publisher limitations and are now controlled by the consumer. They choose the packaging (the user interface), the timing (now, later, over and over) and the device (TV, PC, iPod, Mobile Phone – in a browser, full screen feed reader, alerting platform etc).

With the consumer controlling the discovery and consumption style of their media, the publisher has lost all power on publishing and distribution. The consumer, on the other hand, has gained the ability to get only the best of what they care about in a time and place of their choosing.

Remix and Share
Now that the consumer is discovering individual pieces of media they care about in a format they choose (separate from the original source and container) they have the power to remix and redistribute that content in any way they see fit. They can create their own stream of syndicated information mixed in with their own voice and delivered to friends, family and a growing fan base. The consumer has become a publisher. More accurately – they have become a participant.

The examples above (and others) show that Content Syndication actually tips the scales of power in favor of consumers turning us all into active participants in the media and publishing landscape. And the scales deserve to be tipped.

We each have a voice and a worthy story to tell. Our latest storytelling device is Syndication.

Marketplace Opportunities
The resulting marketplace opportunity in this shift is for the aggregators. Those that can effectively empower users to discover, consume, remix and share their media across publishers and platforms. Google got the ball rolling by allow us all to search across sites in a way that returned valuable and accurate results.

In the next wave of internet based innovation new platforms will need to focus on consumption and sharing.