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.
The APML Workgroup is tasked with converting the current specification into an agreed standard.
It has already started its work with a revised spec. More information can be found on the APML website at www.apml.org
We invite all the players in or around the Attention Economy to join us in refining, implementing and evangelizing APML. To join the Workgroup please contact us with your qualifications. Members of the general public are invited to join the mailing list (via the APML.org website) forums or blog to provide feedback.
More about APML In a world where our online footprints (Attention Data) are measured, dissected, analyzed and used to better target us with content and advertising, APML represents a way for users to take back control of their own Attention Profile.
In order for the study of 'Attention' to evolve into the Attention Economy we must have a way to export, own, trade and assign value to our own Attention Profiles. APML promises to become an important part of the solution and we believe this announcement is a significant milestone in it's development.
Attention Profiles will become our digital fingerprints and will eventually have implications for all aspects of our lives including Media, Business and Lifestyle.
Web 2.0 - Nothing to see here... moving right along...
A lot of people are reading and writing about Web 3.0 again - Spurred by Alex's post on RRW.
I, myself, have written about Web 3.0 late last year. Here's an excerpt:
Web 3.0? Are you serious? Apparently a lot of people are. More than I imagined. It seems from the search results, though, Web 3.0 is some sort of Web 2.0 - except with more of everything. More mainstream users, more revenue (or finding a way to get revenue in the first place), more programmable etc.
To summarize - I thought it was a silly idea.
I was going to ignore the subject this time until I read a post by Peter Rip. I love this quote:
"VCs have always made money at finding the ideal point of friction between the Present and the Future. Profits accumulate in the gap between What Is and What Is Possible. Web 2.0 is now firmly in the category of What Is."
The quote caught my eye because one or two VCs I have spoken to (and an awful lot of investor types are always fishing around) make the statement "oh it's too early for this kind of thing" (this kind of thing being a focus on Attention as a consumer tool). It always makes me laugh.
I do have a problem, however, with claiming that Web 3.0 is all about web services. Web services are an old idea and APIs are already part of the Web 2.0 evolution. So to claim that they are part of Web 3.0 is a bit like saying 'HTML is part of Web 2.0'.
APIs are here to stay. Screen scraping will reduce over time as apps either play nice or die. But I don't think that broader adoption of APIs is a sufficient paradigm change (at least on its own) to justify a new version number.
So to summarize:
Web 0.5 was about communication - Chat/Email.
Web 1.0 was about one way publishing - CMS/Portals - Corporates came first and they declared their message to us poor users. Community was relegated to a second class citizen on forums (if at all)
Web 2.0 was about two way publishing - Blogs/YouTube/Digg - The community (specifically the individual acting as part of a community) become a first class citizen. The web became personal.
I am not sure Web 3.0 is coming. At least not any time soon. Instead I think the next big opportunity is Media 2.0.
I think that Web 2.0 was merely an overdue adjustment in our thinking. It was a realization that the web is not just another broadcast medium. That broadcasting radio/TV/print over TCP/IP was not the point or the promise of this new platform. It was a realization that interaction models that empowered the audience to become the most important part of the ecosystem was the actual point of the medium.
It's like when TV grew up and stopped doing radio plays and started doing lifelike drama.
I think the next revolution is the web transforming other forms of media. That is, creating interaction models that go beyond the web (or extend the web into more places and form factors). It's about the web transforming traditional TV, Radio and Print to become more interactive. It's about democratizing the mainstream - not just on the web - but everywhere.
Ad agencies are spending a lot of time and creative juices trying to manufacture stuff that people should 'Pay Attention' to each time having mixed results. They are seeding blogs, commenting, creating content and faking YouTube stats all in an effort to get noticed.
From the article:
"The move to bring a measure of predictability to the still-unpredictable world of viral marketing is being driven by clients trying to balance the risks inherent in a new marketing medium with the need to prove return on investment, said agency executives."
Some campaigns work - like the one below:
But many don't. While the video above got millions of impressions (and is still going - even getting linked on Blogs dedicated to the subject of Attention!) other videos that would (on paper) be expected to get a lot of attention don't.
"Then there's the seven-minute film by Leaving Las Vegas director Mike Figgis of Kate Moss in her underwear for Agent Provocateur, a lingerie maker that had what would appear to be the recipe for a viral sensation. But it was viewed fewer than 75,000 times in the three months after it was uploaded last September."
There is a fight going on out there. To win hearts and minds. And I am not talking about the War on Terror.
Actually what they are really fighting for is Attention. Once they have that - its yet another battle to actually convert Attention into Engagement.
In the mean time. I am having a very hard time uploading a screen-cast of Touchstone in action. Google Video and YouTube seem to compress the heck out of it so you can't read the screen! This should be easier.
Esther Dyson is one of the thought giants of the Internet. She thinks on such grand scales and puts them in such clear terms that it's a joy to read her stuff and hear her talk.
Her post about MetaWeb's Freebase is no different. I posted about Freebase earlier and I offhandedly mused that it was counter intuitive to the philosophy of Web 2.0 whereby we are creating an emerging structure of tagged/microformated/syndicated/user-centric/open content.
Esther has written a far more eloquent post about it. Although the creators of MetaWeb are her friends and she is decidedly for their approach she takes the time to put their efforts in context and frame the debate of 'Emerging Structure' (i.e. structure will emerge when most sites provide structured content and algorithms sort it out) vs. 'Intelligent Design' (where the structure comes from a given database architecture).
She writes:
"This all reflects a fundamental if still incoherent debate. There's one school of thought that says that if you just collect enough data and throw enough algorithms at it, the inherent structure - and the understanding of that structure - will emerge. After all, that's what happens with human beings, though it takes a decade or more. (And in some people, the process even continues into old age.) The recent explosion of tagging is taken as evidence of this: With their tags, users are creating implicit relationships among online objects, and indeed, complex webs of relationships are emerging, with nodes, clusters and other rich structures. But the relationships themselves are poorly defined, other than strong or weak - and possibly, links made by my friends or by trusted authorities, vs. links created by anyone.
By contrast, the opposing point of view says we have to hand-design the relationships and structures - like the complex database schema about cars."
"As far as I know OnePipe is the first solution to offer generic, on-the-fly feed filtering based on URL parameterization."
And that's exactly what it is. She has used Yahoo! Pipes to create a generic feed filtering service in the form of a bookmarklet.
Simply Highlight some text on the page, click the OnePipe bookmark and you are presented with links to the feeds on that page filtered by the words you highlighted.
It is like a bookmark driven FeedRinse or a very rudimentary Touchstone.
Announcing support for Linkedin and Subscription Plugins
Imagine getting alerted instantly when your LinkedIn contacts have a job on offer or when they add a new contact you might want to know.
The latest build of Touchstone does just that. If you have your copy check it out in the Subscription Helper.
Now imagine doing it for MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 etc. The latest build of Touchstone also makes that possible!
Paul has added a feature called 'Subscription Plugins' that allows developers to quickly and easily write little XML files that add Touchstone subscription support to all sorts of services.
Combined with Dapper.net this sort of functionality can be taken to a whole new level - making it easy for users to get alerts from all your favorite web apps - even those that don't support RSS (without the need to write dedicated Input Adapters).
We have included support for LinkedIn already - we look forward to see what the community can come up with. Be sure to email us your plugins.
Also, since this type of extensibility is a first in the Feed Reading space (as far as we know) we would be interested in collaborating with other feed readers out there to add universal support and working with app developers to build their own plugins for the Subscription Helper. Drop me a line.
Imagine a world without Metadata. Now call it 'The mainstream...'
Recently I have observed that we, as early adopters, use an enormous amount of implicit and explicit Metadata when making feed reading decisions.
When skimming our thousands of items a day we are actually making value judgements based on who the author is, what the headline reads (and what we think the topic is based on the headline), if there are any pictures to catch our eye and so on and so on.
When we come across a blog, I think that most people look for the subscriber count and consider (at least at the back of their mind and as part of a larger value judgement) whether or not they should add the author to their subscription list based on how authoritative that number makes them. Adding someone to your feed list is a relatively big decision. So the 'subscriber count' metadata is important.
The problem though, is that mainstream users don't know this metadata. They don't know that engaget is the top gadget blog. They don't know that Chris Messina is an authority on OpenID and Microformats and they don't know what constitutes a small or large subscriber count. They also don't know about Technorati and therefore don't know how to check a blogs rank before consider the weight to place on the post.
"Now imagine walking into your local grocery store, and you notice all of the traditional taxonomies have been removed because product classifications are a form of metadata. The aisle signage has been removed. The only things you can see are the blank containers designed for the products themselves. Let's suppose you need soup to go with Saturday's dinner. You grab a can and begin to shake it in hopes that the weight and movement can provide you with some indication of the contents. Is it tomato soup or a can of beans? Perhaps it is a can of peaches or mixed vegetables. Or, maybe you're an experienced shopper who can distinguish between soup and other products. Is it chicken noodle soup, vegetable soup or clam chowder?"
He also talks about metadata without context using foreign travellers as an example.
"My wife and I ran across this in the Atlanta airport a few months ago when traveling overseas. A woman standing outside the train car that moved travelers from the concourse to the travel gates was having a problem understanding the metadata information that was all around her. She asked us if we knew any Spanish, to which my wife replied, "Un poquito," or just a little. She started to reel off sentence after sentence, trying to explain to us her issues. The best we could do was to hand her off to another couple that knew much more Spanish than we did. Here is the point: as a traveler, she was surrounded by all the information and metadata she needed to either get her luggage or head to the departure gate. She simply couldn't understand the information she needed to take action."
I think that mainstream users are just like foreign travellers. They lack the understanding to use all the metadata ques to filter information quickly in a flooded feed reader.
I think that if mainstream Media and business management want to reach their audience, then we need to give them a way of helping users get important content by making metadata
a. Easier to understand. b. Collectively factored and contributory to a single Personal Relevancy rank.
"The idea of a centralized database storing all of the world’s digital information is a fundamental shift away from today’s World Wide Web, which is akin to a library of linked digital documents stored separately on millions of computers where search engines serve as the equivalent of a card catalog."
Is it just me or does this seem completely antithetical to the entire point of the Web in general and the Web 2.0 philosophy specifically?
Are we not trying to create a distributed, democratic and user-centric reality where the right of self-expression trumps data silos?
So why would we all be rushing to contain all data in a single database?
Wouldn't it be a more effective solution to build a search engine that could aggregate content across the web by extracting and indexing it in a structured way. Something that can look for Microformats as well as try to extract structured data from unstructured pages using semantic analysis (similar to AdaptiveBlue).
It could even offer its index/database via APIs.
The difference with this scenario, though, is that we don't all have to play nice with a single database/API - they have to play nice with us. This is about shifting power from the few, to the many after all.
It seems to me to attempt otherwise is moving in the wrong direction.
Am I missing something here? Let me know what you think...
Our subscribers go up and down as you'd expect. But I thought I would note that right this very second feedburner reports that we have 666 subscribers. Please invite your friends to subscribe so we can move of this terrible number.
Of course you could change the number if unsubscribed as well - but I'd prefer you didn't do that. ;)
"[...] That leads Chris Saad to ask when we’re going to get overloaded? Oh, Chris, we’re well past that point."
Earl then writes a very interesting response.
"He's right, we're past it. Can we just stop talking about information overload? We've been told about every 12 months for the last decade that we are "suffering" from information overload and the net result has been that every following 12 months we have found ways to multiply the amount of information that comes pouring through our connections."
I also think he's right. Talk about Information Overload is like talking about air - it just is. However, Robert actually misquoting me. I was not asking about information overload. My question to Robert was actually about scaling the social aspects of social media.
The premise is that consuming information is one thing, but interacting and responding with people is another. My question was how many people can you possibly have 1:1 meaningful interactions with. Can Scoble really add hundreds of names and connect with each of them? Maybe so - but could Oprah add all her audience as friends (thus converting them into participants)? Obviously not.
Forgetting that for a moment though, Earl goes on to make a great point about the concept of Information Overload:
"I have a theory; the 'real world" creates and dumps on us levels of information via multiple senses that is many, many orders of magnitude deeper in bandwidth than anything that we can even conceive of coming across the net. Our ability to contact, filter, manage, organise and act on that information is already honed to a very high degree.
Even increasing device-based information tenfold represents a trivial increase in that information load and we actually have no problem dealing with it. To invert Parkinson's Law, our ability to handle information expands in direct proportion to is availability.
Earl's corollary; once we realise that there are deeper wells of information to be drawn on, we dive in."
I think that is a fascinating perspective on the issue. I have never seen anyone think about it in quite that way. Maybe information overload is a myth. Maybe we can each scale up our bandwidth as our needs require. Maybe scaling up isn't even necessary - as Early suggests, maybe our senses are far more capable than we imagine.
Interesting...
I am sure some help with our senses would come in handy though - after all - most of us use sunglasses to help filter the sun right?
As I predicted with the Media 2.0 Roadmap - more and more TV will be about airing "What's popular" from the web. Just like Current.TV.
Here's a post covering the topic further entitled "You can be on TV!"
VH1, currently airing the third season of "Web Junk 20," this moth premieres the Jack Black-hosted "Acceptable TV," which attempts to fuse TV with the Web. In February, Nickelodeon debuted a two-hour programming block called "ME:TV," featuring contributions from 10-year-olds. TLC recently began a six-part documentary series, "My Life as a Child," in which kids were given cameras to videotape their lives. Also, high-profile, consumer-created ads for Doritos, Chevy and Dove ran during the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards.
[...]
Current TV, now in about 40 million homes, predates the YouTube sensation with its viewer-created "pods," which make up a third of its programming. Joel Hyatt, who co-created Current TV with Al Gore, is understandably a little irritated that his network — which launched in August 2005 — hasn't always been given the credit it deserves.
"We pioneered the concept. We are the only television network totally premised on the concept of viewer-created content," says Hyatt. Hyatt says Current purposely wanted to level the playing field in television, rather than unveil itself as a Web site. (Current does boast a robust Web site and plans to launch a full "destination" site this summer.)
I think the way that Current.TV allows its audience to join the conversation is amazing. It is the embodiment of next generation TV. The reason they don't get the credit they deserve though, I think, is that they themselves don't join the conversation beyond their own network/blog.
"Chris Saad and Ashley Angell of Faraday Media / Touchstone have introduced a standard format for attention data. I’ve had a chance to look through the APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) proposal, and short of seeing the word Profiling and noticing email address as an attribute in the profile, it looks promising. I can see a benefit to having an agreed-upon format for attention profiles, similar to the HL7 spec for personal health information."
It's a great read about Attention Profiling in general - check it out.
Phil Morle has just posted about the information overload and media 2.0 scale issues I have been covering lately and he makes an excellent point:
"We are becoming good filters, but poor philosophers. We are good at information retrieval and storage and not so good at the long-thought. We need machines to become better at filtering media 2.0 - show us the important stuff, let us get into the background stuff if we have the time and let us trust that we aren't missing anything. We need time to think." [Emphasis added]
To put it another way, I wonder if we have more information... but less understanding.
Just like 24 hour news networks (who suffer from too much chatter and not enough context), we spend so much time trying to keep up with, comment about and clip/snip/remix everything we may have forgotten how to keep perspective.
Watching Robert Scoble's presentation about "Living in a Google World" it struck me that he has learned a lot about filtering information for himself. He admits he does a lot of his filtering based on how a post or headline might catch his eye, and also by a learned sense of authority about the author of a post.
It's great that people like us have time to process all this information and think deeply about information consumption and trends.
But I think most people don't have time.
Knowledge workers have traditionally had the benefit of analyst reports and high-quality premium data to give them insight into emerging trends.
Now, however, there is a need for them to join the real-time conversation and filter information for themselves. How will this affect their ability to synthesize new ideas and keep their eye on long-term opportunities?
I fear most people will end up in a reactive echo-chamber world with very little original thought because they are too busy just trying to keep up. Or maybe that's nothing new?
Does Media 2.0 Scale? When do we reach Saturation?
I have had this question in the back of my mind for a month now.
"Does Media 2.0 Scale"
If one of the tenets of being in 'Social Media' is for everyone to be... well... social - at one point does your ability to socialize reach saturation point?
To me, Robert Scoble is the best example of this emerging problem.
It seems to me that he is the ultimate Social Media 'celebrity'. He takes his social responsibility seriously. He lists his cell phone and email address on his website and responds to most of his email. He blogs like crazy and comments on blogs that mention him. He talks on panels and joins all sorts of crazy workgroups.
And now... he is adding every single one of his followers on Twitter as a friend!
This is at once both admirable and crazy. How can he possible keep up?
Surely he has (or soon will) reach the limits of his social scale.
I'd like to ask Robert, as one of Media 2.0's leading social celebrities, to write a post about how he deals with all these people coming at him asking for attention - how does he Pay Attention to everyone.
Consider also that if Robert is the new model of celebrity - where the host of your favourite TV show needs to be accessible and social - how does this kind of activity scale to mainstream levels.
Fill us in Robert!
What does everyone else think? Perhaps this is a follow on from the 'My Media Consumption Diet' meme. How do you decide what to ignore and how do you try to scale up your social interactions. How is it possible for more visible people to do the same. How can all of this 'level up' when social becomes mainstream?
Maybe scale is not a desirable effect though? If we scale our interactions up - do we not necessarily have to scale the depth of those interactions down?
BBCs Click website has recently published an article about Technology Addiction. I think I have a problem ;)
Prof Kakabadse added: "It's addiction to portable technology, which you take with you practically to bed, the cinema, to the theatre, to a dinner party. The symptoms are, like with any other addiction, that people spend more time using their technology than spending it in socialising or in family time."
Also there is a good section dedicated to how the medium is the message.
For instance, an e-mail can wait two days to be answered but a text message demands an almost immediate reply.
Stefana Broadbent from Swisscom said: "E-mail is considered the most formal. At the other end of the spectrum SMS is the most personal of all.
"That's where we find all those little exchanges, little endearments, what we call grooming, which is sending: 'I think about you. How did it go? How did you sleep?'
He added: "That is actually given by the number of characters. With such few characters, you have to have a lot of mutual understanding and mutual knowledge."
But it's not all bad news... apparently it forces us to get smarter.
"Studies have been done showing that people can actually enhance their cognitive abilities, which helps them to process more information at the same time. And their performance even transfers to other tasks."
Perhaps one day we can just double space our brains and jack a fibre optic cable into our ears.
This is a blog
about using Attention Data to help users
filter the noise and experience a
personally relevant
Internet. It is written by the two
founders of Faraday Media - the creators
of
Particls and co-authors of
APML.
Who's Who
Ashley Angell: Co-Founder/CTO: Entrepreneur, Code Guru and TV Addict
Chris Saad:
Co-Founder/CEO: Entrepreneur, Media Junkie and Attention Ninja
