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Announcement: Particls Private Beta released

Added on by Chris Saad.
Hi everyone,

We would like to announce that the first full private release of Particls Beta has been distributed. If you signed up to our mailing list your invite should be in your inbox.

All those months of locking Ashley in the programming box have paid off!

On behalf of all the team I would like to thank all the people who have made this milestone possible. You all know who you are but if I may highlight a few below (in no particular order!):
  • Ashley Angell
  • Nik Seirlis
  • Stephen Kelly
  • Cody Robb
  • Paul Jones
  • Michael McNeil
  • Michael Starky
  • Julie Angell
  • Marty Wells
  • Michael Liubinskas
  • Marjolein Hoekstra
  • Ben Metcalfe
  • Daniela Barbosa
  • Marianne Richmond
  • The Alpha and Beta testers of Touchstone and Particls
Thanks everyone

We look forward to your feedback.

Missed out? Drop me a line and the next 50 requests get an instant invite.

Update: The 50 Slots have been filled. But keep paying attention.

Announcement: Touchstone renamed to Particls

Added on by Chris Saad.
In anticipation of a wider release of the Application, we are excited to announce a new name for Touchstone. Introducing... Particls.

And, of course, a new domain at www.particls.com. Please update your links!

Why the name change?
We feel that Particls better reflects our future plans for the product as it evolves into the definitive tool to manage and filter your incoming personal information.

Stay tuned... more updates soon!

Twitter vs. Jaiku vs. Loopnote

Added on by Chris Saad.
I avoided writing about twitter for a long time - everyone has posted how wonderful it is. Even mainstream media including the local Australian Financial Review (in which I was quoted).

There are two main reasons why Twitter is so great.

1. It's dead simple
2. It has lots of great people on it.

As Robert said in one of his Twitters:

"theuer: well, Jaiku is reacting slower than Twitter. It requires more clicks to see your messages than Twitter. And is more complicated. I never knew of it until today, which isn't saying much. What's cool about both of these is the people on them. NOT the technology."


The success of Twitter, though, makes me both happy (to see something grow so quickly and succeed so much - we should all be so lucky) and sad (to see two other services in the same space loose out on all the hype just because the 'right' people were using the competition).

Both Leo (TWiT fame) and Scoble got into Twitter around the same time and started a huge Twitter land rush. That, combined with a celebrity co-founder (Ev - of Blogger fame) made Twitter an instant success.

I actually posted about Twitter and Jaiku a long time before it became popular and actually said that Jaiku was better. But I think I made a mistake. A mistake the Robert Scoble repeated today in a discussion on Twitter itself.

Both he and I (much earlier) compared the two and equated them to the same thing.

I actually think they are quite different. Twitter is simpler, but Jaiku is attempting to be something more comprehensive and different than Twitter. The two can actually co-exist and compliment each other.

While Twitter strives to answer one question "What are you doing", Jaiku asks a very different question (implicitly). It asks "Who are you".

Where Twitter has evolved into almost a chat room, Jaiku has evolved into a Lifestream.

What's the difference? Well what you chat about and 'do' is only part of the picture. There are also photos, bookmarks, blog posts, music selections and more - each of which are not found on your Twitter stream. In fact I have seen many argue that they should NEVER be found in Twitter. Twitter is for human updates about human things.

The advantage of a Lifestream is that it creates a living record of ALL your digital activities. Jaiku calls them Presence Streams - but they are the same thing.

My Jaiku Presence Stream has my blog posts, my Twitter stream and my Flickr photos. Others include their del.icio.us links and more. While there are hacks and mashups out there to make RSS imports into Twitter possible - I don't think it belongs there.

So now Leo is moving to Jaiku. Does this mean everyone else will follow him? Robert already has.

With all the Attention being paid to both these services, a little known service called Loopnote is being overlooked. In part this is because their team is not engaged in the conversation. If you read the comments on Robert's post about setting up a Jaiku account, Martin (who I presume is the CEO of Loopnote) is asking frantically why no one is paying attention to his product.

As Robert says - you have to join the conversation Martin.

Maybe Loopnote is not quite as good as Twitter (for example it seems to have more of a focus on announcements from groups to individuals rather than individuals to individuals), but it's also a little bit of luck. If Leo stumbled into Loopnote first, maybe the whole thing would have gone a different way.

This post is getting a little long.. but I'd also like to point out a very clever observation that Robert makes on this post about Twitter's potential for advertisers.

"You're missing the even bigger opportunity for marketers: people are telling us WHAT THEY USE and WHAT THEY LIKE.

If you can listen and learn to engage people on Twitter you'll find a marketing goldmine here. If I were really smart, I'd hire a team to categorize each Twitterer 24-hours-a-day. I'd start building a database of behaviors shared.

Someone say "changing the diapers." Well, now we know they have a newborn at home. What could marketers do with THAT? TONS!"


What you are actually talking about is 'Attention Data' Robert. I think that Jaiku does a better job at getting a complete picture of your Attention Data (considering you can stream all your personal RSS into it). But rather than give it to advertisers (yuk) there are opportunities to create personal filters out of the information to help reduce information overload.

See: APML and Touchstone. More on this later.

Controlling the message in Media 2.0

Added on by Chris Saad.
I am very late to the story where Microsoft’s PR agency sends its memo on a Wired journalist to the journalist himself (the dossier is here).

Read an insightful commentary on it by Jeremy Wagstaff from the Wall Street Journal.

To me this underscores the level of command and control large companies try to exhert over the message of the day in the Media. A level which, in the face of Media 2.0, has been severely diminished

While orchestrated media campaigns can still be waged by PR companies driving the message for mainstream media outlets and A-list bloggers (with B and C list bloggers following the Techmeme cluster) the great long tail means that something worthy of discussion is still discussed and covered - it still gets ink - somewhere.

Take the launch of Peepel yesterday. The coverage was huge. It seemed like every blog was talking about it (with notable exception of Techcrunch - I think Michael has something against Aussies from Brisbane).

I know that Peepel is a startup and I assume like all startups they don't have a Microsoft level PR firm pulling the strings. Yet they still managed to get plenty of coverage. Coverage that mainstream media would have never provided.

With feed readers and new content discovery/delivery tools like Touchstone, that coverage is being heard by people who are interested. We can now each have our message heard by people who want to hear it.

The leveling of the playing field and the increased diversity of voices can only be a good thing for innovation, understanding and the human race in general.

Announcing second intake of participants for the APML Workgroup

Added on by Chris Saad.

Today we are announcing a second intake of participants in the APML Workgroup. APML stands for Attention Profiling Markup Language.

From the website:

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 new participants are:

They join the existing group:

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.

Stay tuned...

Web 2.0 - Nothing to see here... moving right along...

Added on by Chris Saad.
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 think Peter is spot on. I too am tired of all the 'me too' services out there. They are so unoriginal. In many cases the winners have been decided.

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.

Going Viral - By design

Added on by Chris Saad.
Interesting article was published in Ad week on the 19th called "Clients try to manipulate unpredictable viral Buzz" about clients asking ad agencies to create viral videos for them.

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.

Emerging Structure or Intelligent Design

Added on by Chris Saad.
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."


Like everything she writes, it is well worth a read.a

Announcing support for Linkedin and Subscription Plugins

Added on by Chris Saad.
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.




If you are developer: Read more about it here

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.

Don't have an invite yet? Maybe you should pay more attention.

Imagine a world without Metadata. Now call it 'The mainstream...'

Added on by Chris Saad.
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.

R. Todd Stephens writes an article asking us to imagine a world without metadata. It's a fascinating prospect.

He gives the following real-world example:
"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.

Freebase - Centralized control of the distributed web?

Added on by Chris Saad.
There is a buzz about the launch of Freebase by Metaweb technologies on the web at the moment.

From the New York Times:

"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...

Things are proceeding exactly according to plan

Added on by Chris Saad.
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.

Phil Morle says "We need time to think"

Added on by Chris Saad.
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?

I'd like to think there is a better way...

Major media outlets are starting to understand the zero sum game of Attention

Added on by Chris Saad.
Scott Karp has written a great piece summarizing what we here at Touchstone has been alluding to for quite some time.

Individuals can now make a good living as content creators, without ever creating or becoming part of a scale content business. What’s more disruptive, however, is that in the market for original content, the attention economy is draining dollars out of the cash economy. There remains a zero sum game for consumer attention, so for every minute a consumer spends with content created by an entity whose compensation is in form of attention, there’s a minute not being spend on content created by a for-profit entity.

In contrast, the content aggregation and distribution side of the divided media industry has all the advantages of scale, with the technology-enabled platform (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, search) serving as the organizing principle for the new scalable media businesses. Content creation is asymptotically approaching commodity status, while platforms that can effectively aggregate content and allocate scarce consumer attention can unlock immense value in the new media marketplace.


Bingo.

This does not mean, however, that commercial content creators will lose out while Aggregators destroy their businesses. It means that content creators need to understand and respect and value the role of aggregators to help them find an audience. Further, they need to understand how Personalized Aggregation (based on Attention) changes the publisher/audience dynamic.

First, as we all know, there is no more audience, only participants. But more importantly for this discussion - the participants have different expectations. They want highly tailored content experiences that meet their tastes exactly. And they have no shortage of places to find that conent - in fact too many sources. We sometimes call this hyper choice or information overload.

This means that publishers need to:
  1. Start thinking niche.
  2. Start finding ways to cut through the noise to reach niche audiences.
This is where Attention comes in. By measuring one's Attention you can learn what they are interested in. By learning what they are interested in you can learn what content they want to see more of. From there, it's a hop, skip and a jump to connecting content creators with participants.

It also means that Aggregators will have a growing responsibility to content creators. A responsibility to report statistics, create transparency in their platforms and find some way to help the eco-system of Content Creators become successful.

Read Scott's full post for some more great insights.

Touchstone in your referrer stats - Audiences of One

Added on by Chris Saad.
People have started to notice Touchstone in their referrer logs. So I thought I would write a little about it.

I don't think anyone will ever see a 'Digg Effect' style mad rush from Touchstone. So we probably wont make headlines that way.

So what does a referrer from Touchstone mean?

I think it means something significant. Maybe even more significant than the Digg effect. It means that your article got through the Touchstone Personal Relevancy filter of our Attention Management Platform and connected with at least one person.

One person might not sound like much, but consider that one person after another might turn into hundreds and thousands. Consider also that each of those people are intimately interested in what they came to see.

Not only that - but the user clicked through (despite seeing your headline and synopsis) from inside the Touchstone UI.

With this in mind, Touchstone traffic could become a great measure of your sites ability to intimately connect with audiences of one - people just like you. People that might want to buy what you are selling.

My Media Consumption Diet

Added on by Chris Saad.
Jeremiah has started this meme - I follow in his footsteps!

Here is my Media Consumption Diet (most used at top, least used at bottom).


Web: I get most of my web content via RSS. I read my favorite authors and track my information junkie world via FeedDemon because I am one of those people who has to read every single item.

I also (of course) run Touchstone so that I can get an ongoing view of my news while I work. Touchstone also, by virtue of it's "Automatically Find Information For Me" feature regularly finds information first before any of my trusted authors repeat it in the echo-chamber.

Any other web-browsing happens from recommended links from friends. I occasionally check Techmeme for 'what's popular right now'.

I subscribe to 176 Sources directly + The rest of the entire feed universe via Touchstone.

I also get a lot of mainstream news from Newsmap - I have it as an Active Desktop Component on my second minitor - it is amazing.

TV: I am as big a TV junkie as I am a Web/RSS Junkie. I watch too many shows every week (including Daily Show, Colbert Report, Lost, Battlestar Gallactica, Boston Legal and others). I get most of my shows online. The only TV I watch that comes from my cable or over the air is CNN (for real news and weather!!), Fox News for excitement and propaganda and BBC for a more international perspective. I avoid Australian news because it is rarely interesting or significant.

I watch my downloaded TV via Windows Media Center on a TV.

Movies: I used to watch a lot more movies than I do now. With all my TV consumption I have found that my attention span has been reduced to 41 minutes (the time it takes to watch a typical TV show without the ads). I find it mildy disturbing that I get so restless at the 41 minute mark. I often think to myself "A TV episode would be over by now and probably told a more compelling story".

That being said though, I have a long and growing list of landmark movies in my life that I try to convince everyone I meet to watch. I love movies. I get most of my movies from the theatre - some on DVD to play catchup or for what I call "DVD Movies" - movies not worth the cinema experience.

Update Here: Jeremiah asked me to clarify if my TV/Movies were watched 'On Demand' (or as some might call 'Time Shifted'). The answer is 99% yes. I rarely wait for the networks to tell me what to watch and when. In fact, living in Australia - if I did that, I'd never see anything because they would pick up the show 2 seasons late and cancel it after 5 episodes.

Communication: I access my email from either my PC, Tablet or Laptop. I am addicted to my email. I used to route my Gmail through Outlook, but my Outlook 2007 Beta expired and I have been too lazy to re-install it. The result has been amazing. Gmail + Online Office style apps have kept me going for a month now! When I am out I check my Gmail via my i-Mate JasJam Pda/Phone over Telstra Next-G.

I also sit on Skype and MSN/AIM all day (via Trillian). 99% of my communication is done via Skype chats or calls (even to land-lines from skype in and out).

Twitter is a bit of fun also. I started a MySpace account to see how it worked and now people keep adding me as friends. I don't like using it though (maybe that's understating it a little).

Music: I listen to my MP3s mainly. Sometimes when I remember I go to Last.fm. I love music but lately I have not put much emphasis on it.

Magazines: I used to read Time and a few others. But they are always 2 months behind on news. Like Jeremiah I think it's helpful to know when stuff has hit the mainstream but... latley I don't care.

Yes... I am an information addict.

What’s your Media Consumption Diet?
I tag Marjolein, John Tropea, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Chris Messina, Marty Wells and also my contacts at the Media 2.0 workgroup to share how they get their information. Or if you don’t have a blog, leave a comment to your media consumption diet.

Digg to Support OpenID, Mine Attention Data and looking at APML

Added on by Chris Saad.
Lots of chatter today coming out of Future of Web Apps conference about Digg founder Kevin Rose's talk.

Kevin discussed supporting OpenID and mining Attention Data in an effort to create more personal news for users.

There has been quite a bit of discussion about Digg's implementation of APML as well.

These are all good moves by Digg to open up it's platform and play nice with others.