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Attention
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
My new link blog and a request
Having subscribed to several for years, I’ve finally started my own link blog. It was reading Nick Bradbury’s post on attention that finally got me off my ass. Nick pointed out that, in FeedDemon, the “News Bin” lets me not only keep a list of items I want to refer back to, but also publish them via NewsGator (which owns FeedDemon) as an RSS feed. This was so easy I slapped my forhead more than once over not having done it sooner. The feature is similar to one in the Google Reader, but I love FeedDemon and have no intention of switching.
The rest of Bradbury’s post (which Neville alerted me to) is a good read, too, looking at how subscribing to a number of link blogs and then using FeedDemon’s “Popular” report can turn up interesting topics about which many people are talking, helping further refine my ability to focus my attention on what really interests me. So now I gotta find more good link blogs to subscribe to. So I’m asking: What link blogs do you subscribe to?
Attention • Blogging • RSS • (2) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Sunday, July 22, 2007
The myth of the coming “attention crash”
Years ago, before social media, I did a presentation at an IABC conference that addressed information overload. The blogosphere didn’t exist, there were none of today’s social networks, no Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce, no media sharing sites, no social bookmarking or ranking sites. Yet email and the web alone seemed to be causing a panic. People overwhelmed by the volume of content lamented the good old days of the gatekeeper who pointed us to what was important. My friend Roger D’Aprix worried that the web turned everybody into a publisher, confronting people with billions of pages that could be read while it still takes as long to read a page of text (Roger said) as it did during the Reformation.
I opened my presentation with my personal definition of information overload:
If you don’t care about it, it’s crap to you, even though it might be gold to me. The point is this: There really is no such thing as information overload, as long as the information is content that is useful to you. We can’t get enough information about the stuff we care about. That’s why celebrity addicts gobble up every word about Paris Hilton, political zealots consume every source of political gossip, and sports fantatics devour every sports site and magazine and radio/TV sportstalk show.
Internally, I argued, the trick to managing overload was for the organization to deliberately manage the culture so each communication channel was used to its best advantage. Typically, IT departments rolled out new communication technologies using the “Godspeed” approach. (Remember when email was first introduced to your company? IT got the system up and running, installed an email on your client, and then vanished saying only, “Godspeed.” You were left to your own devices to figure out how to use it as a business tool.) I argued that companies needed a “Message Mission Control” function—funded and staffed—to weave best communication practices into the way things are done in the organization. I remain convinced that bad messaging habits represent a far greater threat to productivity that non-work-related online activities.
Now, social media is raising the same old fears. As Steve Rubel put it:
We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.
It seems that everything that goes around comes around—this is almost word-for-word the same fear expressed a decade ago. And I still don’t buy. I still believe that we can’t get enough information about the stuff we care about. As I noted earlier, we’ll simply get used to it, make necessary adjustments, apply new tools to help us filter the stuff we care about from everything else and everything will be just fine. (Those of you with teenagers know that they don’t fear an attention crash; my 18-year-old daughter has integrated it quite nicely into her very active life, thank you very much. This is a worry held only by those of us who are technology immigrants.)
Internally, such adjustments can be managed by organizations that have the will to address the situation. For society at large, it’s simply a matter of incremental adjustment. If you don’t believe me, look at how the younger generation have all but abandoned email, one of the great early online sources of overload. That’s evolution, and it’s happening before our very eyes if we only stop to notice it. The same incremental adjustments are inevitable in the world of social media.
Attention • Internal • Social Media • (5) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Another way to focus your attention
I don’t know how I missed this, but thanks to Dave Winer‘s latest Morning Coffee Notes podcast, I’ve learned about and become an instant fan of Top 10 Sources.
Winer interviewed John Palfrey yesterday for MCN. Palfrey is founder and publisher of the site; he’s better known as director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The idea behind Top 10 Sources is simple. A staff picks a topic, then culls through blogs and podcasts to identify the top 10 sources in that subject. The Yahoo!-like index of topics makes it easy to find the subject you’re interested in. Under “Health and Science,” for example, you’ll find Women in Science, Environment, Yoga, Women’s Health, Astronomy, Science News, Weight Loss and Controversial Science. A new topic is added daily.
Click to the topic page and you’ll find an introduction from the editor who pulled together the sources followed by the latest posts from each of the 10 identified blogs/podcasts. I checked the Guitars listing under Music, and found a truly useful set of blogs. The posts are listed in “river of news” style, with each page serving as a feed aggregator. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for each page, pulling the updated contents of each topic into your own news reader; alternatively, you can get the OMPL file to update your OPML reader on a daily basis.
The home page is handled a lot like Wikipedia, with different featured topics appearing every day.
In a press release, Palfrey said:
Top 10 Sources is about adding a human element to searching and sorting through the increasingly great syndicated content on the Web. Much like Yahoo! brought a hierarchy to the early days of the commercial Internet with its browser, Top 10 Sources organizes information in blogs, podcasts, wikis, photoblogs and other sources into ‘reading lists.’ The goal is to foster an active conversation among readers, authors and editors that is about, and results in, great online content with context.
The site launched in early December, so it’s not surprising that the Business category is anemic (Venture Capital and Your Money are the only two topics listed so far), but I expect that’ll change as new subjects continue to be added. In the MCN interview, Palfrey also promised that editors would keep an eye on the topics, deleting sources that lose their relevance and adding new ones that rise in prominence. It’s a site—and an idea—to keep an eye on.