Book: The Paradox of Choice

I'm starting to sound like a broken record now - but here is yet another quote about hyperchoice from a lengthy interview with Barry Schwartz, the author of 'The Paradox of Choice'.

“The problem used to be, ‘how do we get information out to people?’ That problem has now been solved in spades. Now the problem is, ‘how do we filter the information so that people can actually use it?’”

He is concerned that filtering technologies may not be up to the task of helping us deal with the overabundance of choice and information we seem to find ourselves having at the moment.

We'll see what we can do.

Thanks to Marjolein of CleverCogs for this!

Morphing Media - Signposts of Media 2.0

Meredith Obendorfer writes a post called 'Investigating the Case of the Morphing Media' over on 'Echo Base' where she predicts the rise of Media 2.0.

She explains a set of recent circumstances that are signposts of a failing Media 1.0 world and the rise of... something else.

At the end of the post she suggests that perhaps it's time to call it Media 2.0.

At a time when VC investment in new media is surging, the question remains, will traditional media be able to keep up? And at what cost will it learn that it needs to morph with the rest of ‘em? Overused dot-oh or not, it’s clearly time for media 2.0.

I have been talking about Media 2.0 for quite some time and as I explained, I think that Attention and Aggregation will play a key part.

Watch this space Meredith!

Attention is Saturated - not Scarce

I have grown to like this quote very much:
 

"What does an abundance of information create? A scarcity of attention."

So if scarcity in a marketplace creates value, then tools that help with attention scarcity are the brokers of the new economy.

I like it because it puts things in economic terms and some people like to think in monetary terms.

David Henderson, however, has another great idea. He claims that his Attention is not 'scarce', it is Saturated.

He says that:

Attention scarcity implies there is attention available. Come on in and I will give some of my remaining scarce attention. Attention saturation implies there is no attention available. It’s all used up. It means you need to displace some already engaged attention to get my attention.

I think that is a fascinating way to look at it.

Because, as he alludes and I have outlined in the Media 2.0 Roadmap, in a world where your attention is saturated, people don't need more ways to find stuff, they need a way to automatically and personally FILTER it.

In a post called 'The Aphrodisiac of Attention', John explains the sinister game that telecommunications companies are playing with our Attention and how filtering might play a role.

...a conversation I had ten years ago with a senior exec of a major telecommunications company. He proudly announced to me that his company had a twenty year plan: "In the first ten years, we will commercialize technology to help everyone connect anytime, anywhere. But the real money will be made in the next ten years. At that point, we will focus on providing technology to block access anytime, anywhere. Can you imagine how much people will pay for that capability?"

John also has the following quote:

Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back.

Attention is Meme Sex

I just came across a facinating post by 'Stan'. He compares Attention to 'Meme Sex'. At first I thought that was a crazy idea, but then when I read further, it all made perfect sense!

He states that:

Biological sex is the penultimate act by which a gene may hope to achieve replication in another body. The genes of the mother and father combine somewhat randomly creating a unique set of genes for the child. This is basic biology.

Right - with you so far... But then he asks...

But how exactly to memes replicate? "Imitation" is often suggested, as in the Wikipedia article. But imitation presupposes something more fundamental: attention. You can't imitate what you haven't paid attention to. Attention is meme sex.

The best part, however, is when he goes on to compare advertising to a kind of sexual assault of our attention.

Read the full article - Attention is Meme Sex. Great metaphor!

I'm suddenly feeling a little randy.

Greg Cohn wants Touchstone

It always amuses me when someone who has not yet found Touchstone writes a post describing the need it fills perfectly. Reminds me why we started this project/company in the first place.

I will quote Greg word-for-word because he is spot on. Hope he does not mind! Check out the full, more detailed post.

This leads to a three-fold problem: As a user, I want to aggregate the things I consume effectively and across all of my consumption devices and venues. I may want to publish my aggregation in various ways in various media, like a blogroll on my blog, bookmarks on del.icio.us, or an OPML file or attention stream in a conference panel bio. (Thus, “distributed aggregation”.) Also, as I chime in with my comments and ratings and other UGC submissions, this becomes part of the publishing side of the problem as well.

As a publisher, I want to streamline my production across many points of access while providing a good, unified experience to some members of my audience. I may want to be able to control my profile pages at Flickr and other places - both to reflect my self-expression goals and to capture data that lets me know how I’m doing - but I don’t want to be responsible for maintaining 13 websites. I want the principle of “write once / publish many” to apply not only to my blog posts, but also to my preferences as a publisher. Thus, aggregated distribution.

Finally, from the point of view of efficiency and value-creation, there is a lot of interesting attention that could be harnessed (and fat in the system that could be eliminated) for the benefit of advertisers, knowledge-aggregation companies like Yahoo! and Google, and, more generally, anyone who wants to communicate with like audiences either in niches or en masse (i.e., media) efficiently. Again, aggregated distribution.

Channel ME

Mark Sigal's recently posted about Channel Me and the Rules of New Media.

He talks about concepts that we have long discussed here such as:

1. If content was king, then aggregation is now the master of the universe
   He writes: Unlike "old media," where content was the star, in new media, it is about the users and giving them control of what they digest, how they digest it and with whom. This article attempts to provide a framework for thinking about the rules of new media and how to work them to your benefit.
   
2. The audience has left the building
   He writes: Once upon a time, content was content, an ad was an ad and the audience was a passive consumer. No more. Increasingly, the lines between consumer and producer are getting blurry.
   
3. Personal Relevancy is more important than What's Popular
   He writes: These tools will have built in recognition systems (like deep profiles) to systematically connect like minds together, and filters that provide transparency that highlights what’s new, popular, recently viewed, talked about or related content.

And he finishes with:

The evolution of the Web from text, pictures and links to video-powered social nets is as profound as the evolution of broadcast media from radio to television, and it is destined to be no less exciting.

I wholeheartedly agree Mark.

Thanks for pointing this post out Randal

Cognitive Power

Attention and Attention Management have a lot to do with Cognitive Science. We never talk about the academics of perception etc here but I thought this picture was a great example.

The picture itself is funny - in fact that's why it was sent to me in the first place. But if you think about it - the only reason you have any clue what's going on is the negative space on the bottom right and the light next to it. From this little piece of data, our brain fills in a full picture, puts it in context with a set of circumstances that together make it funny to us.

Our brains are truly amazing...

Congratulations to Google - Attention Data Matters

I have said a few negative things about Google recently - it seems like they have had a run of bad luck. But this post has made me happy - Mihai and Google have caught onto the idea of Attention Data (although he never quite calls it Attention Data) - and has created a 'Reader Trends' page for us all.






FeedDemon has actually been doing something along these lines for a little while though. I'd like to think that Mihai and the rest of the Google Reader team knew this? Why not give them credit?

In any case, seems like 2007 really will be the year of Attention Data. Lucky we at Touchstone are one step ahead of Attention Data and have moved onto Attention Profiling and Attention Management.

Via Micro Persuasion - Thanks to Marianne for pointing this out for me.

Carefactor: 100

With publishing power ebbing from the few to the many and AJAX killing the postback there are a couple of problems emerging.

1. Media outlets who make a living by selling eyeballs to advertisers are having to prove the value of their ad space amid growing competition from their readers!
   
2. When pages don't refresh (because of AJAX), the number of pageviews a site gets no longer matters. When something no longer works, people are forced to invent something new. When people invent something new they are forced to actually look at the problem. What have they discovered? There is a lot more measure than just 'how many eyeballs are there'. Things like 'how wealthy or influential are the eyeballs', 'how much do the eyeballs trust the publisher', 'how reactive and proactive are the eyeballs in relation to the author' and most importantly 'why do we keep ignoring the person and focusing on their eyeballs'.
   
3. Advertisers are finding it hard to work out who to give their money to. Is google really the best broker of my advertising dollars? Which ad network or publisher can promote our brand and product better?
   

As a result, commentators are abuzz about new definitions and algorithms to measure all this stuff.

Comscore is apparently working on a 'Web 2.0 Metric'.

".....While page views will not altogether cease to be a relevant measure of a site's value, it's clear that there is an increasing need to consider page views alongside newer, more relevant measures. comScore is proud to continue carrying the torch as an industry innovator with the development of a new suite of metrics that will effectively address the Web 2.0 landscape by including enhanced measures of user engagement and advertising exposure. We will be introducing these new metrics to the industry in 2007."

And Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine talks about the Distributed Media Economy

So pageviews are obsolete already, thanks to Ajax and other unpage technologies and to the widgetization of content, functionality, and branding: Again, what’s a ‘page’? Audience measurements are obsolete, at last, thanks to the fact that the
former consumer is now also the creator and distributor: What’s an ‘audience’? Mass measurements are dead, thank God, because we are now joyfully fragmented into the mass of niches: Who’s a ‘user’?

Dion Hinchcliffe posts:

"it seems clear that users, businesses, and other organizations that deeply embrace the fundamental nature of the Web as a communications-oriented platform without any single owner except all of us, will be the only ones able to fully exploit the possibilities for online applications."

I find this last quote interesting. "Without any single owner". But I think it needs to be taken further. Media outlets and bloggers alike don't own their audience. In fact they don't even own their participants.

While people are happy to get trapped in walled gardens like MySpace for now, they will soon realize that blogs are the real social network. While they are happy to subscribe to 10, 100, 1000 blogs now, they will start to realize that there is far too much content and they actually need to subscribe to ideas/concepts/interests - not authors.

So perhaps if the audience is not owned by any single site/source then the metric should not be bound to them either. Perhaps the best way to measure engagement is not by domain, but by concept.

Blog Highlights of 2006

Hi everyone - I hope you had a great 2006. I know we certainly have. In just one year, Touchstone has gone from the back of a napkin to a funded, flying company with a number of great staff, friends, advisors and testers. We wish to thank you all very much for your efforts this year - we literally could not be doing this without you.

Here are the highlights from the blog over the last year in reverse order (most recent at the top).

Hitting the Mainstream 2
Information Overload hits the mainstream media for a second time - in a big way.

Hitting the Mainstream 1
Information Overload hits the mainstream media for the first time (or there abouts)

Democracy Now!
Web 2.0 has barley hit and people are talking about Web 3.0. We discuss how absurd that is and why YouTube is NOT Web 2.0.

Show me the money (or pain!)
Some people (read:head in the sand) think there is no information overload problem. This post explains why there is.

Filtering vs. Ranking
Some people are still talking about filtering RSS. Filtering is so 5 years ago.

Aggregation is King
Content used to be king. If that's true, then Aggregation is now master of the universe.

Desktop vs. Web-based
Web 2.0 implies that stuff is on the web. Not true. This post talks about the value of desktop applications in a web world. By the way - did you know the Browser is a desktop application? Shock/Horror.

What is Attention Data?
And no - it is not just OPML or Attention.XML.

Personalized Content
Some claim that the battle for 'People Powered News' is over. Digg and others have won. I make the argument that People Powered News MIGHT be done, but Personalized Content is just getting started.

There is no more audience
Participants have killed the audience. Media outlets that treat their audience like eyeballs are doomed to fail in a Media 2.0 world. This is a short rant about the death of the Audience.

Touchstone funded by Angel
Touchstone get's funded by an Angel Investor. What more do we need to say about that!

The Long Tail of Attention
Chris Anderson describes the three factors that have made the Long Tail a viable market. I then explain why a Tool like Touchstone empowers the 'Long Tail' (that's you and me) to take advantage.

Personal Relevancy
What is Personal Relevancy exactly? It's when your interests and personality become the basis for choosing content, rather than the whims of one editor who decides what 'the mainstream' should care about.

Tune Out the Noise
Touchstone is not about alerting - it is about NOT alerting. Think about that.

Attention, Scarcity and Demand
Markets work on Supply and Demand. Price is dictated by Scarcity. So in an era of abundance, the scarcest resource is our Attention.

Power Back in your hands
Amazon Recommendations are great... for them. They help cross-sell and up-sell their customers. But what if you could use the same technology to take control of your information across all the sites you visit?

Anti-Web 2.0
Touchstone is a desktop application. Does this make it Anti-Web 2.0?

Not a Gadget Engine
Touchstone compared to the current rash of Gadget/Widget engines out there.

RSS is not just about News
Imagine using RSS for something other than News. Feed readers fail for most of those other applications. Touchstone picks up the slack.


Thanks again for sticking with us. The best is yet to come!

Chris, Ash and the whole Touchstone Crew.

The PageRank of Personal Relevancy

Ilya recently posted some great data and analysis on the current state of RSS reading habits.

He goes on to explain many of the issues I alluded to in a previous post titled "Show me the money (or the pain)".

I think the question of information overload is answered. Yes there is an overload. But RSS is not the problem. In fact blogs and user generated news are not the problem either. They are just one source of information in our lives.

There are application events, presence changes from our friends, internal memos from head office, applications on our desktop and more all clamoring for our time...

So tools that try to cluster and suggest content from blogs and mainstream news sites are only (very) useful for part of the time.

Ilya goes on to make a great suggestion in his post. He recognizes that collaborative filtering has limitations, Keyword filtering is 'so 5 years ago' and that any one 'community voting' measurement will fall short.

With Touchstone we have gone to great lengths to cover all these usage scenarios. We have built a platform that accepts 'items' not 'RSS'. This means that we can source content from places other than RSS and then cache, rank and route them in a unified way.

Our 'rank' is not based on collaborative filtering or keyword filtering or community voting or previous reading behavior. It is based on some and none of these things at the same time. As such, our technology can work in a vacuum on a personal item behind the firewall, just as it can work on a news item that the whole world can see and link (read:vote) to.

Also, there is no 'handshake' period where our application tries to track your reading behavior over time. We are on the client side which means we have access to your browser history/cache, documents and email for an instant, broad and ongoing base of 'Attention Data' in order to determine your interests.

Ilya rightly compares this to PageRank. While PageRank uses incoming links as a vote to measure authority, it relies on a broader set of factors to make a decision and produce a number.

And because the result is a number rather than a binary 'yes or no' filter or an opaque recommendation, Touchstone can make intelligent presentation decisions when displaying the alert/content/information. The bigger the number the bigger the item on the page.

My friend Adam also posted about the 'Feed Overload Problem' on his blog.

An ebb of power from the few to the many...

As you may have noticed, the Touchstone blog is starting to move away from the academics of Attention Management toward the more practical goals of helping people manage their media consumption and business relationships/execution. So in that spirit let’s talk about the mainstream media for a second...

I'm watching Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN at the moment and they have spent TWO segments about the Rosie O’Donnell Vs. Donald Trump publicity stunt feud that is going on right now. Don't know about it? Don't worry it is a pointless waste of time.

Suffice to say there were some inflammatory statements made on both sides and now Donald is threatening to sue Rosie for defamation.

Anderson brought in legal analysts to discuss if Donald had a case etc, etc.

Are you serious? Anderson is the guy who confronted Mary Landriew live on CNN about the governments slow response to Katrina and he is now hosting a lightweight pop culture show!




Perhaps John Stewart said it best when talking about the TIME magazine declaration of 'You' as the people of the year.
In response to the TIME spokesperson's statement that, in regard to Media, "…there has been an ebb of power from the few to the many" Jon Stewart said:

"It's almost as though consumers have moved on because mainstream media has abdicated its responsibility...."

Watch the segment here:



There have been plenty of false statements that deserve legal action in the last few years. Statements that have resulted in the death of thousands of people and massive worldwide unrest. I think Rosie and Donald's little feud does not deserve prime time CNN airtime and legal analysis when those issues are still unresolved.

With the volume of real and valuable information out there about issues that affect our lives, it is my hope that attention management and engagement tools will help users see information that really matters, instead of stupid fluff pieces.

Perhaps, also, those same tools will help publishers/outlets understand the value (in terms of affluence and conversion rates) of participants who prefer real news over the false buzz generated by empty pop culture feuds that chew up valuable air time.

Is Attention Finite?

Over on David Henderson's blog he has posed (and in some ways answered) the question "Is Attention Finite".

I have always considered it finite. As you can see from our Manifesto (written almost a year ago now):

"Attention is what you care about. It is a resource that is quickly evaporating as an avalanche of information sources clamor for your time."

David also quotes John Hagel's post "the economics of attention" which is Amazing.

I dare not quote any one part of it here because it is, in its entirety, a wonderful summary of the relationship between Attention and Economics and future Markets which itself pulls from quotes and summaries from other definitive sources.

Our Manifesto, by comparison, looks simplistic at best. The key for us, however, is not how Attention may affect markets on a macro scale. Nor is it about how companies can get, keep and leverage your attention. Our/my interest is in the individual. Me.

How can I, during my ordinary, everyday life, maximize my time by filtering out the noise and receiving information, products and services that meet my needs and expectations at any given time.

How can I, in an increasingly Attention Savvy marketplace (where companies are mining and using my Attention Data), take control of my Attention rather than ceding control to others.

From this perspective, I think the issue becomes far more manageable. And the value to the user becomes far more practical.

This is not a fight the system proposition however. On the contrary. It is a commercial exercise. The user has an urgent and growing need to take back control in order to bring balance to the system. And when there is a need, there is demand; and where there is demand there must be a supply.

Can you say... BlackBerry?

My great friend Marjolein of CleverClogs tipped me to this piece from the Wall Street Journal:

As hand-held email devices proliferate, they are having an unexpected impact on family dynamics: Parents and their children are swapping roles. Like a bunch of
teenagers, some parents are routinely lying to their kids, sneaking around the house to covertly check their emails and disobeying house rules established to minimize compulsive typing.

It goes on to say...

Emma, 14, also identifies with adults who wish their kids spent less time playing videogames. "At my student orientation for high school, my mom was playing solitaire," she says. "She has a bad attention span." Her mother, Barbara Chang, the chief executive of a nonprofit group, says, "It's become this crutch."

Sometimes it's best just to turn your distractions off. With Touchstone, you can go into 'Away' mode and it will suppress all alerts until you get back. One of the advantages of routing all your alerts through one alert management system!

Media 2.0 Roadmap

I have been thinking a lot about 'Media 2.0' lately. So I quickly wrote up a roadmap from the distant past media landscape to our near future opportunities. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Distant Past (Local Radio Stations)

• Distribution: Costly, via radio towers and dedicated ‘wireless’ receivers
• Content: Local news and radio plays
• Advertising: Local sponsors
  

Past (National Radio Networks and TV Networks)

• Distribution: Costly (via radio and TV towers, TVs and Radios)
• Content: National shows targeted at demographic groups
• Production: Costly
• Audience: One way broadcast from the top to the masses
• Content: ‘What’s popular’ (as decided by editors) is on the air – segmented by broad demographics
• Advertising: Local and National sponsors
  

Recent Past (Internet – Web 1.0)

• Distribution: Cheaper (via modems and PCs – unstructured content in HTML)
• Production: Costly (in terms of time and skills)
• Audience: One way broadcast from the top to the masses – now also on the web
• Content: ‘What’s popular’ (as decided by the editors) is on the air – segmented by more niche demographics
• Interaction: Interest groups and communities trapped in silos
• Advertising: Local and National advertisers splitting revenue across web, tv, radio.
  

Now (Internet – Web 2.0)

• Distribution: Mostly Cheap (existing TV, Radio towers and across multiple devices using the Internet – structured content via RSS)
• Production: Cheap (just click publish on your blog)
• Audience: Two way participation within the audience (‘the bottom’) with democratic editorial control in the grassroots
• Content: ‘What’s popular’ (as decided by the audience) as measured using services like Technorati, TechMeme and Digg etc. Segmentation in the mainstream continues by more thinly sliced Demographics)
• Interaction: Interest groups unbound by silos (due to RSS)
• Advertising: Context sensitive Ads targeted at the page – served by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft
  

Coming (Media 2.0)

• Distribution: Cheap (across multiple devices using the internet as the ‘universal pipe’ – structured content via RSS). Aggregation is the main user interface.
• Production: Cheap (just click publish on your camcorder and mobile phone)
• Audience: The audience is gone, only participants are left: Two way participation with all stakeholders and democratic editorial control of what’s on the web and what’s on the air
• Content: ‘What’s popular’ (as decided by the participants and measured by services like Technorati, TechMeme and Digg) is played on air. Segmentation by niche interest groups.
• Relevancy: With hyperchoice, ‘What’s personally relevant’ becomes far more interesting that 'What's popular' – Audiences of one.
• Advertising: Ads targeted at the individual – served by aggregators

Web 3.0 - Are you serious?

I am starting to get a little sick of talking about versioning the web - as I'm sure you are. But I've just found something that has forced me to address it again.

Have you seen this? It's a search from the Web 2.0 Workgroup website on Eurekster on their hottest topic at the moment - Web 3.0.

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.

First let me restate my case about Web 2.0 (*sigh*). 'Community' is not Web 2.0. Community is as old as Newsgroups and IRC (pre web) forums (web 1.0) and have merely changed shape with more sites dedicated to 'user generated content' (ugly term I know). So the community aspects of YouTube (for example) are not what make it Web 2.0.

The Web 2.0 part is more complex and profound - yet it all has a common theme - the participant is the most important entity in every transaction. You and I are in control.

It's about how the creative and editorial power is shifted from a central editor to a community of millions.

It's about making the site content portable through embedded players and syndication.

And it's about the CEO bloging about what they're doing so that the community has a transparent way of understanding the motives, intentions and direction of THEIR platform.

YouTube, however, is still not a fully realized Web 2.0 platform. It still tries to trap the user on their site. To drive traffic to their pages and to create a community on their terms.

The ultimate Web 2.0 solution is when I create my own platform and video is only part of my self-expression and community. Where my friends are my friends, irrespective of the tools they use or the content they create.

This platform is already emerging - to date they have been called Blogs, but I think blogs are much more important than people think. Maybe the name needs to change to suggest something grander than a 'Web Log' - but ultimately blogs are the ultimate form of participant power.

They are not a forum, yet there is a discussion going on.

They are not video hosting site, yet there can be video there.

They are not a photo sharing site, yet there are photos there.

They are not mySpace yet I have a list of subscribers (read: friends) and contacts (read: blogrolls).

They are not social news, yet Technorati and TechMeme seem to know what the top news is.

Blogs are the purest example of Web 2.0. They are decentralized, syndicated (and then aggregated), social, self-expressive personal islands that connect via a great ocean called the blogosphere.

So if we have not yet properly recognized, commercialized and leveraged Web 2.0 - why the heck are we talking about Web 3.0. Especially when it seems like the definition seems to be 'Web 2.0 for the masses'. If Web 3.0 is Web 2.0 for the masses, then that sounds to me like Mainstream adoption of Web 2.0.

I am queasy just writing all these version numbers.

Dreaming up the future is one thing, but trying to create a new buzzword so that you can be the first one who thought of it is quite another.

Web 2.0 represents something much more fundamental than a bubble of new software online. Web 2.0 represents the democratization of information and media. It is a change in the way we tell stories and connect to each other.

More importantly than that, however, It is a symptom of a cultural change in the civilized world from top down hierarchy to distributed participation and freedom of expression. Where the storytellers are no longer just manufactured celebrities – but you and me. Where what’s newsworthy today is not what’s popular for my demographic, but rather what is personally relevant to me.

Let's not trivialize this cultural change (it's greatest example being Web 2.0) by trying to jump ahead to some fantasy version number just because some of us want to pretend to be pioneers.

The reorganization around people

Over on Leafar's blog he has made a great post entitled 'Venture with Wit' that covers a number of topics including chasing VC/Angels who have the right understanding of the Attention Economy (we have found it is better to let them find us) and various factors that affect information flow.

These, according to Leafar, include: Content ("Hyperchoice Problem" - I love that name), Identity (An area where we have contributed APML) and Social (at which point he kindly mentions Touchstone as the best example of work being done in the area.)

I particularly like these quotes from his post:

From EquityKicker.

"As I’ve said before to me the web is re-organizing around people instead of sites"

I wrote about this in a recent post called "Aggregation is King"

Another great quote is from Umir

"Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry."

Ultimately though, users don't care about these market forces and factors of information flow. What they care about is a highly tailored experience that saves them time, delivers the right information on the right device and at the right 'Volume'.

If the web is reorganizing around people and Attention is the scarcest resource, then a tool that performs ultimate personalization by indexing, apply and managing user attention must be worth something to someone :)

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.