Walking the Walk

Creating a profile of a person’s attention is something Touchstone has been doing for some time now. Since we have launched the APML specification, we have had a lot of positive feedback about it, which has been both inspiring and reassuring. Additionally, APML addresses something I have felt for a while now; that I have grown weary of the constant "banter" about solving the Attention Deficit Problem.

One thing that we feel will make the difference, is the implementation of the APML specification into real-world (and value added) user scenarios.

Having an attention profile specification is all well and good, but if nothing useful uses it, there isn’t much point in having it. At some point, the talking has to stop, and action must (and should) always take place. In order to facilitate the widespread use of the APML specification, we have charged Michael (a member of the Touchstone Development team), to building an APML library which will consume and process APML data so other developers do not have to worry about designing/programming their own to process the format we have suggested. We understand the pressures of supporting a standard like this, so this library and it’s source is going to be free for whomever wants to use APML in their applications.

While APML is still a young format that is being discussed by the community it it will continue to change and grow - we are committed to making it the right kind of solution for storing an Attention Profile (so that end users don't get 400 different ways of describing and profiling a person’s interests) and taking the first step by releasing these types of contributions. We will be releasing another build very soon, but we hope that within the week we will have the initial APML library ready to go for anyone who is interested in joining the “less talk, more action“ bandwagon, with Attention Meta-Data consumption.

You can read more about APML at the APML website.

Tripping: Pre-Trip Prep

Housekeeping note: I will prefix all posts to do with our San Fran trip 'Tripping' so that those who are only interested in Touchstone or Attention related things can skip them.

Now on with the post...

Before you spend lots of money to visit a country you have never been to, to meet people you have only read about or chatted to it's important to do some ground work. Paperwork (E.g. Get your passport), Technology (E.g. How can I keep reading my feeds and getting my email) Geography (E.g. Where exactly is the Bay Area?) and social (E.g. Who are you and where will you be).

As part of the process I seem to be getting a better understanding of the layout of San Fran and Silicon Valley than I do of my own City.

I look forward to actually meeting some of people I have come to know over the last year but never actually met. People who have inspired and motivated us to do the things we're doing. They probably don't even know the effect they've had.

I have also been getting to know fantastic new people like Tara and Chris.

Now all we need is a place to stay!

All of this is happening while the latest build for Touchstone is coming together so well that I am starting to think that there is very little to do before we can go Beta... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

A little something

AreYouPayingAttention.com

Not sure what else to do with the domain yet. Any ideas?

Traveling with Spam

Good news - we are heading over to San Francisco/Silicon Valley from the 29th of October to the 22nd of November.

It will be a great chance to catch up with all the friends we've made and meet some new ones along the way. If you are in the area during that time then feel free to drop me a line and we'd be happy to catch up. Unless you're a murder of some description.

I will try to keep regular updates on the blog about our travels so that you can feel like you’re there.

Also... am I the only one that got about 400 pieces of spam last night? Most of it was the same spam email over and over "Make your career with TrustPartners Company as a part-time Payment Manager!". Either they stuffed up or have decided that if 0.1% of spam gets a result, let’s send it out 10,000x more.

The Human Network

I just stumbled across something that, as far as I can tell, is a brilliant stroke of marking genius by Cisco.

They call it 'The Human Network' and it is a phrase they have coined to try to embody the connections being made on the new social web.

One of my favorite definitions of the network is by Mike Davidson from Newsvine.com:

The human network is the only defense we have against the ever-increasing flow of information to our overworked brains. The technology of publishing was originally about creating signal. Then, as monetization became more important, noise was added. As information discovery shifted to the web, customization allowed for an increase in signal and a reduction in noise. Now, however, we're at a point where even in the absence of any noise, there is simply too much signal for most brains to handle. Enter the human network -- a collaborative filtering system which vets all signal against the profiles and tastes of those we trust, admire, and love. Not all signal is created equal and the human network is the only way to adjust for this.

I would (and have) describe it like this:

The Human Network means that there is no more audience. There are no more users. There are only participants. Participants in a human scale network.

Participants do not passively consume what an author, creator, director, developer, editor, critic or media outlet has to publish. They do not accept the authority. They do not sit silently ready to have their eyeballs converted into cash.

Participants participate. They create their own original information, entertainment and art. They remix their own version of mainstream pop culture – copyrighted or not. They post their thoughts, publish their fears and fact check every announcement. They share with their friends and discover the quirky and interesting, making it an instant blockbuster – at least for 15 minutes.

Participants are no longer eyeballs to be converted. They are ideas to be declared. Individually they are a market of one. Collectively they are a trend, a publishing powerhouse and a voice to be heard. A voice that has something to say.

Participants have changed the way media is published and interactions are monetized. But more broadly and importantly than that, they have changed the flow of global information from top down to bottom up. They are changing the tone and tempo of the conversation.

Elvis? Who is he? It’s the audience who has left the building. All that’s left are fellow participants. We are all authors, creators, directors, developers, editors, critics and media outlets. We are a million voices saying one thing – listen to me.

As Mike says, however, with all this signal, we need a way to create personalized media experiences. Our own personal signal.

"Now, however, we're at a point where even in the absence of any noise, there is simply too much signal for most brains to handle. Enter the human network -- a collaborative filtering system which vets all signal against the profiles and tastes of those we trust, admire, and love."

However I believe that collaborative filtering is only a factor of Personal Relevance.

What do you think of widgets?

Niall and Om are organizing an event for the Widget community.

People often ask me what I think of Widgets/Gadgets. Here is my answer:

Is that Attention Management?

Vs.

It might not be as fancy and graphical - but I would argue it is far more useful.

Widgets are ok for interactive elements. But if you want to track information over time (e.g. RSS news, packages, auctions, stock prices, application alerts etc) then you need a more intelligent approach.

OPML Auto-Discovery

In Firefox and IE7 subscribing to RSS is dead simple. When the page contains RSS a little RSS icon lights up. Click for instant access to the feed. Whether or not there is useful consumption tools for that RSS is another story though ;)

We have actually done a lot of work in the Touchstone Feed Reader to do auto-discovery of feeds from pages. With the new Feed Subscription Helper, when prompted for a URL, you can provide either a web page, or an feed. Touchstone will automatically detect if the page contains an alternative view, determine the format of the view (E.g. Atom or RSS) and load the feed in the appropriate way.

One thing we never considered, however, is the discovery of OPML.

That is exactly what Marjolein has just posted about on CleverClogs. A bookmarklet for OPML Auto-discovery in Firefox.

What a clever idea!

I think we should support something similar in in latter builds of Touchstone.

I think that the act of distributing sets of feeds in OPML is going to become more useful and popular as people realize that they can subscribe to broad set of information (i.e. many feeds at once) and a Personal Relevancy Engine like Touchstone while can help filter the noise from the signal to produce a useful result.

Also, I don't see why we couldn't periodically check the OPML file to detect changes in the list too - this way you have a live reading list like some feed readers have implemented already.

Update: Digg Her Article Here

Since when does 'Search' translate to 'Hosting Video'

Google's original mission was to help the world find information. So why, in recent developments (yes including the Google/YouTube buyout) are they so intent on hosting all that information as well.

"They need to diversify to stay competitive"

Diversity is one thing. Straying so far from your original business and philosophy so that the brand is diluted and your partners are alienated is another.

Search is not the end of line for information discovery and management. The fact that Touchstone, Attensa, Digg, BuzzLogic and Techmeme exist is testament to that. They are all products and services that aim to help organize the world's information so that users can find the signal from the noise. With so much diversity in approaches and usage models, it is obvious that there is plenty of room to innovate and monetize products inside the original problem domain.

What's more, these forays into various other product categories are alienating the partners who use their ad network. Instead of keeping their ‘do no evil’ image and remaining the benign partner of choice they are becoming just as 'evil' as Microsoft trying to own and run everything (note: I don’t actually think Microsoft is bad, but it is a common perception).

They are making mistake after mistake by going after 'wow look at me' projects instead of focusing on what they do best.

So why isn't Google doing its job? They have lost focus, lost good will and are now finding themselves competing against Microsoft in areas they have no expertise.

Microsoft still can’t compete with search.

It is obvious they can’t do smart information management systems. Products, hosted apps and distribution they can do. But they can’t do maths. Google should be taking advantage of that fact by building better algorithms and visualizations that make information accessible. Not hosting video. They could have achieved the same revenue result simply by cutting a deal to run YouTube’s ads. They don’t need the headache of running the whole company.

8 things that happen when you announce a new idea

The few days after we announced APML were very interesting for us. We experienced all sorts of fairly subtle forces occurring in the early-adopter community that I thought I would document for everyone to consider.

They included:

1. Genuine joy and interest in announcing and participating in new ideas and technologies.
   We can't be more grateful to the people who covered APML. They have engaged us with questions, clarified our position with us and have offered to get involved to help things become real. They seem to understand that for sustained innovation to occur, this thing can't become a 'me too' or 'mine' culture.
   
   
2. Massive influxes of traffic
   It goes to show that when you have something to say that is of interest to a lot of people, those people will come. We often get massive spikes in traffic as we announce the pieces to our strategy and the APML announcement was no different. It was due in no small part to the great people who helped us post the news so quickly and effectively.
   
   
3. Great email feedback and offers of help.
   We have had offers for involvement from massive brands and industry leaders who see the value in Attention Profiling as it relates (for now) to describing one's ranked interests. They understand that this is not academic. We have already implemented this stuff and that the proposal is an outcropping of our development work - it is already reality. They understand we are doing something that established players like Google and Amazon or newer players have not even tried to do. We are lifting the lid on our very valuable information and allowing the user to control their Attention Profile in the spirit of AttentionTrust.
   
   
4. We became one of the Memes of the day.
   We ended up on Techmeme and Tailrank - very cool!
   
   
5. A growing level of jaded apathy.
   Some people can't seem to be bothered with a new idea. It has (in their minds) either 'been done' or 'too hard'. They don't understand that an idea (and announcing that you have one) can be the catalyst for a discussion, not the end of a conversation. Some even say the conversation is overcooked. Well I think people are still talking about construction and we have been doing that for a few years too ;)
   
   
6. An active resistance to new ideas.
   Speaking of the 'mine' culture. No one owns ideas. Or even problem domains. They are free. Especially when you declare them free and open. Some people seem to have forgotten that. When you call for involvement and participation, some people will disagree with you and some people will fork what you do. That's what keeps things iterating and improving.
   
   
7. Two wildly different reactions on Digg and an obvious indication that Digg seems to be in the process of being overrun by children and trolls.
   We have been Digged twice now and each time it has had the same result. Little or no action (i.e. new subscribers to the mailing list or active/constructive conversation on the blog/forum).
   
   In particular the APML announcement generated two separate Digg posts by two different people. One in the Software category which generated lots of 'great idea' type comments and the other in the 'Tech Industry News' category which brought out lots of trolls who made rude, off-topic or ill-considered comments. So it seems like a growing number of Digg's audience is interested in the next funny thing rather than getting involved with an idea. It's a shame that so many people can have so little to contribute.
   
   
8. And most disturbing of all is an inability for many bloggers to glean perfectly simple and clear information from 2 pages of content - causing them to have to ask questions that have simple and obvious answers. This has lead me to wonder if people actually read the page and considered all the facts before posting about it.
   I don't expect journalistic instincts and a hunger for the truth (in fact most Journalists can't even pull that off these days), but it seems like some bloggers couldn't get their facts straight even when the facts were staring them right in the face. They would quote a piece of content from the site that stated a fact, and then they would ask a question as if the answer wasn't right there in front of them! Very weird.
   

I wonder what is happening to our little bubble (the one I can't even bring myself to call Web 2.0 anymore), maybe it is time for it to pop so that people who are interested in getting things done can do so without all the noise.

In time though APML (after it has gone through revisions with all the thought leaders) will become an important piece of the puzzle.

So in closing - I would like to thank the people who fit into the first few items on my list and helped with the APML announcement and discussion (please don't feel bad if I left you out - too much going on in my head!) - Alex Barnett, Stowe Boyd, Noah Brier, Steve Gillmor, Seth Goldstein, Frank Gruber, Marjolein Hoekstra, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Randal Leeb-du Toit, Mitch Ratcliffe, Marianne Richmond, John Tropea, Martin Wells, Vincent van Twillert and my friends and colleagues Nik, Steve and Ash.

The thing about innovators...

I have finally caught up with Scoble's blog after a long break in my feed reading duties and I came across an interesting post called "The one thing about innovators"

It talks about how Robert Scoble, in some ways the biggest champion of RSS/Feed Reading/Blogging, took 2 years to understand what they meant for the world. Dave Winer had to explain it to him several times!

I remember when he showed me RSS. I thought to myself “isn’t that nice?” I couldn’t see why I’d use it. But, he kept at it. Every time I’d be over his house (called “the Internet Hut” by my son) he’d show me RSS again, each time from a little different angle). I still didn’t get it.

This reminded me of another comment I heard recently on the Gilmor gang where Jason Calacanis effectively suggested that (and I paraphrase) 'you know you're on to something when no one else agrees with you'.

I find these two related sentiments interesting. In some ways it might be true. You might be a visionary who is ahead of their time and the trick is to create an adoption curve by creating practical applications out of your crazy, forward thinking ideas.

On the other hand, though, maybe you are simply being too academic for your own good.

I have been involved with products that no one understood. They were simply targeted at the wrong people and pitched the wrong way. They were also ahead of their time. And I have been involved with other products (like Touchstone) which most people just 'get'.

If I had persisted with the former, maybe after lots of hard work the team/product might have been vindicated. Or maybe we were just on the wrong track.

I am not sure which is true. I suspect that you can have a lot of resistance to an idea for number of broad reasons including...

1. It is crap.
2. It is ahead of its time.
3. It is disruptive to people's current business models and threatens their livelihood.
4. You are targeting the wrong people and/or pitching it the wrong way.

I guess true innovators can work out the difference and react accordingly.

One blog can make a difference

You might have guessed, from my last post, that I was a massive Knight Rider fan. Well my cousin just sent me this and I just had to share. Totally OT (except maybe Kitt was a great information agent).

Paying attention to details

Are you paying attention?

From Conversations to Influence via Attention and Intentions

The Cluetrain Manifesto was a massive influence on me. It changed the way I think about my entire field from technology to marketing and public relations. Cluetrain was a revolution in my mind. It still sits next to my bed with little post-it notes sticking out of it where I marked down my favorite parts. There are almost as many post-it notes as there are pages.

Since then, Doc's (and his co-author's) writings, I feel, have inspired (or at the very least been validated by) the entire blogging/social/casual revolution.

The result has been an explosion of information. We have all become participants in the ecosystem of giving and getting attention. More importantly than that, however, there has also been an explosion of transparency, accountability, participation and genuinely participant focused technologies and media experiences. It has literally made the world a better place.

This movement has spawned entire fields of study and innovation starting at Attention Management, moving into Intentions and now the most recent blip on my radar - Influence.

I only started to consider Influence seriously when I discovered BuzzLogic. Their demo at demofall and their blog is interesting and insightful. They have added even more depth to the picture for me.

I love their app (based on what little I have seen) but better yet I love the philosophy. As the Knight Foundation would say "One Man Can Make a Difference". Perhaps in the remake of Knight Rider the quote will now state "One Blog Can Make a Difference".

Influencers are all around us. Being able to map the landscape will be a powerful tool indeed.

Another interesting development has been that Doc has given the Buzzlogic guys permission to post the original manifesto in wiki form so that the community can begin updating it for the next phase of our little revolution. What a nice thing to do.

I also noticed that Buzzlogic's tool sends email alerts based on various conditions being met. I wonder if they need a client-side alerting platform.

Announcing APML: The OPML of Attention

We have just announced Attention Profiling Mark-up Language over on the new APML blog.

For those of you who have been following our work, APML is an evolution in the file format we have been working on for some time now for Touchstone called 'I-AM'.

I-AM will still exist, and it will now be joined by something called U-AR, however these names will now reference the technologies that write and consume APML rather than the file format itself.

Our hope is to create an APML Workgroup of industry experts to contribute to the spec and then submit it to the appropriate standards body(ies).

From the site:

APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.

The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

From the blog post announcement:

Today Faraday Media (Creators of Touchstone) announce a new initiative to work with the community in order to design and implement “Attention Profiling Mark-up Language” or APML.

APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.

The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

Imagine being able to export your Attention Profile from Amazon and plugging it into Digg to get an instantly customized view of the top Digg stories most relevant to your interests.

We anticipate that an ecosystem of technologies can begin to write and consume the format and we are taking the lead with Touchstone’s U-AR and I-AM engines. We look forward to working with everyone in the community to ensure the format delivers on this promise and empowers users to take control of their Attention.

Find out more about U-AR and I-AM at www.touchstonelive.com/technology
Find out more about APML at http://www.apml.org/

The discussion has already started - track the conversation.

Web 2.0 in an Occasionally Connected World

Chris and I often converse with each other about a fantasy world where we would happily live. In this world, internet connections are high bandwidth, always on, and free for everyone to use, wherever you are. Sadly, “reality” just hasn’t caught up with us yet. Must be because it has a strong Liberal bias. ;)

Because we don’t have this free-for-use subspace ulra-wideband connection, Web 2.0 only works so far. It’s something that we feel sets Touchstone apart, but also means that we have this constant balancing act between the value we add into the cloud and the value we add onto the client.

It’s something which I am afraid to admit has always perplexed me about the Web 2.0 world – the plethora of diverse and spectacular applications available is staggering and inspiring; so long as I am connected when I want to use them. It’s one of the reasons I seem to be slightly more pessimistic about web-based apps than Chris.

We feel that it’s very important for Touchstone to bridge this gap by persisting information for Web 2.0 apps when the user is intermittently connected.

Filter the noise, whether you’re online or off!

Silence is Deafening

I agree with Steve that the silence some of us are generating is getting too loud. Now that people (read: competitors) are paying attention to blogs and VCs are paying attention to all our ideas it seems like everything that matters is too important to say in case someone steals it. I have to say though. Steve's post was beautiful. He's like a poet.

Some announcements to come though... Actually I think one might have leaked early.