Missing the point on TalkCrunch

I'm listening to the latest TalkCrunch episode and something is driving me crazy.

First they're talking about information overload becoming a massive problem - if only there was a way to keep track of personally relevant content.

Second, they are talking about widgets becoming a popular phenomenon except for:

1. No way to monetize users for the widget makers
2. The OSX Dashboard is not persistent enough and therefore a little annoying
3. Vista uptake will be slow so their sidebar is not very useful yet
4. Widgets can crowd the desktop

Well... Touchstone solves these 4 problems.

1. Input and Output adapter makers can monetize their adapters by distributing Touchstone and sharing revenue with us (we have not mentioned this yet - but stay tuned).
   
2. Touchstone is cleverly designed because it is always on and always on your screen, but it measures its disruptions. The more important the news the more 'present' it is on the desktop.
   
3. Touchstone runs on Windows right now - no Vista needed
   
4. Refer to point 2.
   

Third, they are also talking about Digg and how it might kill off 'at least the smaller papers'. Michael missed the point that Digg is about what's popular - not about what's local or personally relevant. Google news or Digg do not replace your local/small newspaper because the local newspaper is about local news! What's needed for that is a Personal Relevance Engine.

Also Robert just asked for Touchstone - he wants to be able to subscribe to many sources and be alerted when something personally relevant is going on! Robert I'm a big fan - consider me jumping up and down waving my arms trying to get your attention and love :)

2 kinds of people in the world...

... those who can count, and those who can't.

No wait...

I was just chatting to Marianne from Resonance Partnership and we got to talking about Attention, the complexity inherent in the current discussion about Attention and how a product like Touchstone needs to hide that complexity almost totally (if not totally) away.

She suggested that (and I paraphrase):

"If you can take away the feeling of being overwhelmed then you have adoption"

And then I commented:

"I think there are 2 kinds of people in the digital world. Those who don't follow any web-based news because they don't know where to start, and those who do, but are starting to feel saturated by it."

In both cases she is right - they're feeling overwhelmed - both in a sense of not knowing where to start and therefore never trying or in the sense of knowing too much and trying to keep up.

Those two scenarios are probably the key adoption drivers for a product like Touchstone.

Nick Bradbury thinks of RSS as an alert system

It's great to see that Nick believes, like me, that RSS should be more than just 'news'.

In this words:

I think of RSS as a non-intrusive alert system.

He goes on to explain that feeds should not be tied to blogs, but can also be used to alert you to new content or even help you keep track of the content you have already seen.

Apathy and Ignorance

Are you paying attention? That's our slogan here at Touchstone. And in today's post I thought I would share a little history behind its meaning.

There are a couple of subtle layers represented by that slogan - particularly for Ashley and I.

First, Touchstone started as our little side-project for us and when we decided on the slogan we were wondering if anyone was paying attention to our work. So the slogan represented our question to the community. It was a sort of inside joke.

Second, and most obviously, Touchstone is about Attention Management. So the slogan, I think, asks a very simple, yet very profound question. Are you paying attention. Who is you? It's the student who may have some homework to complete, or the Mom who needs to know about a new type of medicine for her family or the Executive who needs to keep an eye on industry and competitor information so that he can make the right decisions. It's all of us who would love to stay informed, but just don't know where to start.

Third, it reflects a broader question that has plagued Ashley and I for a while now. What makes people pay attention? What makes them stand up and take notice. How can (careful this might get a bit deep for a humble blog post) humanity make sure it's paying attention to what matters. To things that directly affect us but may not be immediately apparent. How can we fight against apathy and ignorance. How can people become more informed in a way that seems painless and even pleasurable.

The reason I bring up the slogan now is because I have another agenda. My agenda is a little off-topic but through my clever literary skills I have tied it back to Touchstone to justify my posting it here (got ya!).

You must go see "The Inconvenient Truth".

If it's still on a cinema anywhere near you (I know in my city for example, it is not on all screens and I had to drive out of my way to see it) then go pay some money and go see it. Don't download it, don't wait for the DVD and don't let people tell you it's just a lecture.

Vote with your wallet and check it out. Fight against apathy and ignorance and bring all your friends.

Its message is more urgent than terrorism and more catastrophic than potential nuclear war. It gives new meaning to "Mutual Assured Destruction".

The tail wagging the head

Recently I wrote a post called 'The head wagging the tail" about how Stephen Colbert (and others like him) in the mainstream are using platforms for long-tail publishing to create viral buzz about their shows.

Now, the opposite is happening. The long tail is manipulating the mainstream media by creating buzz with new forms of entertainment and then trying to leverage that audience into old-school forms of entertainment like talk shows and ultimately movies.

The first example of this is LonleyGirl15. Check out the latest story on TVSquad where the actress (recently outted as such) is going to appear on the Tonight Show to tell her story.

We're Hiring

Just a quick note to let you know that Faraday Media (the company that is working on Touchstone) is hiring!

So please head over to our 'Jobs' page to see if you might have a place in the team.

Jobs Page...

Algorithms Vs. Group Intelligence

I saw a Presentation/Q&A session with one of the Google founders who, when asked about his opinions about the (then) new trend of tagging responded with (and I paraphrase):

At Google we have always thought that computer algorithms should be responsible for indexing and classifying information for people rather than the other way around.

It struck me that this statement revealed a potentially growing philosophical divide between companies like Google who believe in machine based indexing, ranking and searching vs. the latest 'web 2.0' creations that seem to focus on explicit user/community interaction (and a belief in Group Intelligence) in order to achieve the same thing.

As far as I can tell, Google has resisted most forms of tagging in their applications while Web 2.0 apps continue to integrate it as one of their primary content classification methodologies.

While the question and answer was about tagging specifically, I think it applies more broadly.

For example, Google uses computer algorithms to determine which search results belong on the front page of a search and their news page uses yet more algorithms to work out what's 'front page news'. In fact, even some meme trackers have the same philosophy and use algorithms to discover and rank news and blogs – these include Tailrank, Techmeme and Technorati.

Digg and Wikipedia (as well as other similar sites), on the other hand, use direct human interaction on a mass scale. Group Intelligence.

However, I don't recall anyone ever saying 'I just got Tailranked'. Tailrank (and similar sites) do not seem to generate the level of traffic and interest as Digg has recently.

However, as most people know, Digg is in the middle of some controversy over their ranking systems which is causing many to wonder if ‘Group Intelligence’ (particularly when it comes to voting/popularity/value judgments) is actually just another name for Herd Mentality'?

With Touchstone, we have mainly made a bet on Algorithms in order to determine the 'Personal Relevancy' of an incoming item - but that's not to say that those algorithms can't take into account a broader set of factors including direct user rankings and feedback.

Constant Pile Reduction Mode (CPRM)

Ario has written a great tale of personal woe when it comes to dealing with piles. I will quote a little here:

Have you ever noticed how much of life consists of pile reduction? Tasks where your sole involvement is to take the pile, let's call that N, and make N = 0, where 0 is really 0, nothing... or some state of equilibrium.

He goes on to give an example of the piles in his life including:

• emails
• open tabs
• reading through rss feeds, blogs, friend's lists

Of course he also includes 'Trimming your nails' and 'Cutting Grass' - but the point is clear.

It struck me that our software seems to mimic our real-world pile reduction mentality.

As Ario writes - if only there were a way to let the information flow over us instead of having to 'mark feed as read'.

He has received a surprising number of comments on his post too - I think people are seriously stressed out by this problem!

What's on the horizon for IT Departments?

Mike Gotta posts another great article about the use of various presentation styles in order to deliver information in proportion to its importance and relevance to the user.

Having spoken to Mike before, I know he's a smart guy - and he is making great strides in explaining attention management to enterprises.

While Touchstone is not strictly targeted at the Enterprise, it seems that, like Google, individuals in the enterprise may decide to adopt it in their workplace anyway.

A Matter of Attention & Focus

Here's a quote:

Activities in the forefront zone have the highest focus for users. This means that users' attention is also at its highest level and they spend the most time monitoring changes in those activities. At the other extreme are horizon items. These have the lowest level of focus, the least level of attention and the least amount of time checking for new information and communication channels

The web as a platform - With Touchstone Alerts

Recently the issue of client-side vs. server-side has been foremost in our mind. It's been a hot topic internally and most recently Read/Write Web did a story comparing the two worlds citing Touchstone as an example of software that bridged the gap between the web world and the desktop world.

I think this message is key. The new, evolving web operating system is an important paradigm change. Loosely coupled applications that deliver a host of services (many that were once provided on the desktop) are already changing the way we think about software.

Ultimately though, the web delivery mechanism - the browser - has limitations. I like to call it a sandbox. Your web applications can play in the sandbox but they never really matter. They never quite make a difference in the 'real world'.

Sure this might change when the loose couplings become less loose, and the standards become better defined (like Ray Ozzie's web clipboard and Microformats) but ultimately the browser's paging and post-back model (if you like it or not even Ajax requires posting back to a server to get most of its info) can never come close to achieving the 'escalating alerts' that we achieve with Touchstone.

The ability for a semi-transparent, non focus stealing alert to appear on your desktop while you work is simply not possible (not to mention the ability to index your HDD looking for Attention Data) from the browser.

Also, God forbid you browse to another page. Then the web-app has lost all hope of reaching the user until they come back or check their spam filled inbox (or one of their ever increasing widgets stuck firmly on the wallpaper behind all their 'real' applications)

In short - the Touchstone team passionately believes in the web. We even believe in the evolving web operating system. We believe in it so much that we are building Touchstone as a desktop application.

How does that make sense? It makes sense because we believe all those web-based applications will need a way to alert the user 'beyond the browser sandbox'.

As Richard said on Read/Write Web:

"There is a place for both webified desktop apps and browser-based apps. Indeed the browser is basically just a desktop app at its most generic."

If the browser is the desktop app that lets you view web-based apps, then Touchstone is the desktop app that lets you view alerts from web-based sources.

Touchstone in the Australian Financial Review

Touchstone was mentioned in today's edition of the Australian Financial Review. A big thanks must go out to Mark Jones for his eloquent explanation of what we do.

We've spent 6 months trying to find ways to boil it down into a simple explanation and he did it in a few days - genius!

This is a great quote:

"Touchstone reduces rivers of information to a trickle"

and this...

"Co-founder Chris Saad described Touchstone as 'an attention management engine' for busy people who deal with a constant stream of incoming information.

They are working in Word trying to produce a document and want to get a heads-up display of their life"

or this...

"... The software is one of the first tangible results of a movement that has been brewing in Silicon Valley circles for the past few years."

New Touchstone Site Online

Hi everyone - just a quick note to let you know that I just published a new site for Touchstone. So maybe it's time to click through from your feed readers and give us some more page views :)

Check it out here!.

Thank you for your patronage.

The Dialog Platform

The ambition of this project is awe inspiring. I can't wait to see the ongoing results.

Dropping Knowledge

10 things you should be monitoring

One of the usage scenarios for Touchstone is keeping track of conversations about your business, people and products. You could do this by setting up persistent searches/RSS feeds via various blog tracking services and using Touchstone to get desktop alerts while you work. So in that spirit, I thought this post was rather interesting!

10 things you should be monitoring

Via Resonance Partnership

Video Podcast conversation - From Old Media to Attention Management

On G'day World Video Edition with Cameron Reilly, Cam interviews Mark Jones (IT Editor of the Australian Financial Review) and Hugh Martin (Editor of News.com.au) about the state of newspapers and leads a conversation that takes us from old media to the long-tail and the resulting information explosion.

The conversation abruptly ends just as Mark hits the nail on the head when he mentions that the power will soon be in the Participant’s (not the big brands) hands. Participants will have tools to create a filter their media experience to match their individual tastes.

For some reason Cameron doesn't seem to like that idea though - I wonder why?

Check it out here on the G'day world site.

Update: A PDF about the changes in the newspaper industry.