News Flows, Consciousness Streams

The New York Times doesn't know it yet, but an article published in the arts section is a prophesy for where their news business is heading. Ironically it's burried in the arts section.

"News Flows, Consciousness Streams: The Headwaters of a River of Words"

It's a post about the new art installation at the Time's headquarters. From the article:

Since The Times moved in June from its longtime home on West 43rd Street in Manhattan to its new, almost completed tower designed by Renzo Piano on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets, two men - an artist, Ben Rubin, and a statistician, Mark Hansen - have all but taken up residence in the building's cavernous lobby, huddled most days around laptops and coffee cups on a folding table. Flanking them on two high walls are 560 small screens, 280 a wall, suspended in a grid pattern that looks at first glance like some kind of minimalist sculpture.

But then the screens, simple vacuum fluorescent displays of the kind used in alarm clocks and cash registers, come to life, spewing out along the walls streams of orphaned sentences and phrases that have appeared in The Times or, in many cases, that are appearing on the paper's Web site at that instant.

As stated on this blog many times - the future of information consumption is not stocks, but flows.

As information workers and members of the social web, we need to change our pre-conceptions that information must be collected, sorted and marked as read.

Instead we need to realize that there is so much beauty in the world, we just need to let it flow through us, making us feel warm inside (to paraphrase the movie American Beauty).

Fav.or.it announce intended support for APML

Fav.or.it have announced an intention to support APML on their blog. From the video it looks like a very impressive feed reading app - can't wait to play with it!

The announcement is on the Fav.or.it blog.

Dallas Freeman Joins Faraday Media

A new staff member joined the Faraday Media team today. Dallas is an old colleague and is helping us out part-time.

In his other job, Dallas is working as a multimedia lecturer at a Technical College just north of Brisbane so he bring a lot of fresh and innovative ideas to the Faraday Team.

Welcome Dallas!

OT - Re-starting my personal blog

I've decided to try to resurrect my personal blog - so if you'd like to follow along check it out over here.

Here's an excerpt:

Are you looking for money?

My answer has changed dramatically over the life of Faraday. It has gone from "Looking for money? What you mean on the street?" to "Are you kidding, we would love any money - how about $10, do you have $10?" and then to "Sure we are raising a round, we have [insert great elevator pitch here]". It then shifted to "Really? Is that all you got?" and so on.

Since some of the most recent developments in the product/business strategy and the great adoption rate of APML has become clear the question "Are you looking for money" has been raised a few more times.

Most recently though, my answer has changed again. My answer now is "No, but we are looking for partners".

Newsgator and Bloglines support APML

We are very happy to announce the following new developments for APML.

NewsGator Announcement
NewsGator has just announced on their developer blogs that NewsGator Technologies Inc to support APML across its product range starting with FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and NewsGator Inbox

Further, The APML Workgroup is announcing:

• With NewsGator Technologies APML implementation, they now join:
  
  
  • Cluztr.com (Clickstream Sharing),
  
  
  • Dandelife.com (The Social Biography Network) and
  
  
  • Particls.com (Attention Management Engine)
    

  These are three companies that already support APML using Engagd.com APIs.
  Engagd.com makes APML implementation quick and easy using a simple API— great for mash-ups all the way through to large-scale apps.

• There has been a new APML.org site launched - It's designed to make APML a little easier to understand.
  


• There is now a new APML public discussion group for the community.
  


• There have been a number of new additions to the APML Workgroup:


• NewsGator (family of cross-platform and mobile feed aggregators)


• Bloglines (web-based and mobile feed aggregator)


• Me.dium (social browsing)


• Ma.gnolia (social Bookmarking)


• Talis (semantic platform)


• Peepel (multi-window AJAX environment and office suite)
  

This follows previous successes of the APML Workgroup such as:

• Existing members of the Workgroup, including those from Faraday Media, Citizen Agency, Digg, Dow Jones and Compete.
  
  
• Bloglines (Owned by Ask.com/IAC) has previously announced that they are investigating APML support in their product.
  
  
• Open-source APML libraries available for all to use on Google Code.
  
  
• Great explanations of APML usage by Marjolein Hoekstra (Basics of Attention Profiling), Ben Metcalfe (Thoughts on Tom Morris on APML) and Elias Bizannes (What is APML and why would you want it). Follow the rest of the APML blog discussion on the CleverClogs Attention Profiling news radar.
  

Thanks and Acknowledgements

As usual, I would like to thank everyone involved in and around the APML Workgroup.

Particular thanks to the latest round of announcements must go to Chris Pirillo, Ben Metcalfe, Elias Bizannes, Daniela Barbosa, Ross Dawson and Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Also my personal thanks must go to Marjolein Hoekstra who has been instrumental in pushing things forward.

Coverage

• Read/Write web have picked up the story
• Read the NewsGator/FeedDemon announcement on Nick Bradbury's blog
• IMified have announced support for APML in their FeedCrier product
• Cluztr is providing an APML TagCloud widget
• Daniela Barbosa from Dow Jones has written a great post about APML in the Enterprise
• Ross Dawson writes about the value of a standards based Attention world

Digging deeper into the APML Spec

Elias Bizannes has posted a great follow up to Marjolein's Attention Profiling overview. While Marjolein explained Attention Profiling in general and walked through the user experience of using Engagd, Cluztr and/or Dandelife to get one.

Elias has dug deeper into the spec itself to explain the type of information you APML can actually store about you and how it maps to the real world.

From his post:

APML - the specification

So all APML is, is a way of converting your attention into a structured format. The way APML does this, is that it stores your implicit and explicit data - and scores it. Lost? Keep reading.

Continuing with my example about Sneaky Sound System. If MySpace supported APML, they would identify that I like pop music. But just because someone gives attention to something, that doesn't mean they really like it; the thing about implicit data is that companies are guessing because you haven't actually said it. So MySpace might say I like pop music but with a score of 0.2 or 20% positive - meaning they're not too confident. Now lets say directly after that, I go onto the Britney Spears music space. Okay, there's no doubting now: I definitely do like pop music. So my score against "pop" is now 0.5 (50%). And if I visited the Christina Aguilera page: forget about it - my APML rank just blew to 1.0! (Note that the scoring system is a percentage, with a range from -1.0 to +1.0 or -100% to +100%)

Read more on his post.

New APML site launches

The long awaited update to the APML site is here. We have tried to make it a little less geeky and a little more user-friendly. But we have also expanded the Geek/Developer sections to help you get started quickly!

Check it out at www.apml.org

Basics of Attention Profiling - By CleverClogs

I've said it before, and I will say it again. Marjolein is a wizard. She takes complex and abstract ideas and makes very real examples and walk-throughs out of them.

She has done it yet again with her latest blog post entitled "Basics of Attention Profiling through APML".

As her blurb says:

"If you want to inform yourself of the basic principles of attention profiling or need to explain the concept to others then please read on. Feel free to add your clarifications, your conclusions and your constructive criticism to this deliberately non-geek conversation."

She begins with a great summary of the topics she will cover:

In recent months quite a few bloggers covered the growing adoption of APML, a proposed standard for attention profiling. Those about to give up reading here already, please don't. I personally found most of these posts delving in rather deep. If you want to inform yourself of the basic principles of attention profiling or need to explain the concept to others then please read on.

With today's post I'd like to make an attempt at writing a layman's article answering exactly these three questions:

1. What is attention profiling and what are the benefits?
2. What tools and services already support or endorse attention profiling?
3. Where could you go next?

And answer them she does. With screenshots and all.

Check it out - show it to your Attention challenged friends - spread the love.

The post is already linked in a RWW post by Marshall.

OT - Take your blinkers off!

Lately I've had the opportunity to look at things from a very different perspective. Rather than looking up all the time, I have been looking down more often than not. I don't mean this as a statement of arrogance - I am sure there will be plenty of opportunities for me to look both up and down in the coming months and years.

I only bring it up as part of a larger point. I have found a lot of people fail to see opportunities. They look down when they should be looking across. What do I mean? I mean most people fail to think laterally. They head in a given direction with blinkers on (the type horses wear, not the type cars have) and they fail to understand that people - community, relationships, like minded friends - are what really matter.

As an example, I have seen VCs ignore opportunities due to the most ridiculous of reasons and criteria - criteria like geography or how polished a 'pitch' is. You know what? If you have such a failure of imagination that you think geography is a limiting factor then you really shouldn't be making decisions about betting on companies. I'm so glad we are not looking for money.

I have seen start-ups ignore a helping hand from other start-ups who are further along than they. They fail to listen to the marketplace, to trends or opportunities and instead decide that they can do everything on their own. They think their product or vision lives in a vacuum. They forget that 100 other companies are trying to do the same thing.

Companies are not about a feature, or a product, or a business - they are about an ecosystem. Suppliers, staff, partners, customers, evangelists, advisers, friends, advocates and passionate users. And most of all, they are about a culture of change - of finding opportunities.

I have also seen sharks - people who approach with the hand of friendship but are really just sucking you for information. They have a 'not invented here' attitude - if they didn't think of it, or they don't control it, then they think it isn't worth supporting or adopting. You can only leach off people for so long before your name looses all credibility.

They also make a lot of claims. They claim that they can make things happen, but first they want to take over your company or charge you a bunch of money. If you can make things happen, then go ahead and start. If you actually deliver something then we can talk about formalizing your involvement. If you really believe in my work then put in some work of your own.

And finally I have seen talkers. People who constantly talk but fail to act in any meaningful way. Not even on their own projects. They throw their weight around, bluster around loudly, argue the academics and semantics of a subject endlessly but never quite deliver their own version of the perfect reality they claim to uniquely see.

To all these people - and the others I have failed to describe - take your blinkers off. Wake up. Reach out. Make friends. Understand that, in the end, we are all just part of a living, breathing ecosystem. Someone you underestimate today may, in fact, control the conversation tomorrow. A company you dismiss because they are missing a slide in their presentation may become the next Facebook.

How do I know? Because I have seen those things happen - and they are still happening.

I have recently had the pleasure of getting to know people, companies and investors who understand that people are the most important resource of all. That co-operation is more important than capital. That giving people a chance, and contributing real substance over bluster is more valuable than track record or geographic location.

To those people - and you know who you are - thank you for showing me what can really be achieved when people put aside ego and politics to just get things done.

If you would like to join such a group - drop me a line at me@chrissaad.com

End of rant

Bloglines announces intention to support APML

Bloglines has announced support for OpenID and an intention to support oAuth and APML.

This is great news for users who want to take control of their Attention Profiles. We expect this to be the first of a number of announcements from larger players over the winter.

Thanks to Eric Engleman (New GM at Bloglines) for his support of open standards and user rights - he is really shaking things up over at Bloglines in the best way possible. Having spoken to Eric myself, it is clear that he has a keen understanding of the issues and is dedicated to creating an improved feed reading experience while giving users ownership of their own metadata.

You can read more on the Bloglines Blog. You can also implement your own APML support with just a few lines of code using Engagd.

Thanks must also go to Chris Pirillo for making the introductions.

You can read further coverage over on Read/Write Web where Marshall has done his usual thorough and eloquent analysis.

Further Coverage:

Ross Dawson from Future Exploration Network has written a very thoughtful piece about the growing APML movement and its implications for user control and advertising.

Ian Forrester from BBC has covered the announcement.

Elias Bizannes from PWC has also chimed in.

Daniela from Dow Jones has written a post. She may consider moving back to Bloglines now!

Duncan Riley over at Techcrunch has picked up the news also.

Get APML in Microformats

Ian Forrester has posted an exploration of the idea of APML based Microformats. I like the idea, I am not a fan of the name he gave it though. I'd like something more like "APML/L".

Tom Morris, on the other hand, says we don't need APML. Be sure to check out my response in the comments.