Apathy and Ignorance

Are you paying attention? That's our slogan here at Touchstone. And in today's post I thought I would share a little history behind its meaning.

There are a couple of subtle layers represented by that slogan - particularly for Ashley and I.

First, Touchstone started as our little side-project for us and when we decided on the slogan we were wondering if anyone was paying attention to our work. So the slogan represented our question to the community. It was a sort of inside joke.

Second, and most obviously, Touchstone is about Attention Management. So the slogan, I think, asks a very simple, yet very profound question. Are you paying attention. Who is you? It's the student who may have some homework to complete, or the Mom who needs to know about a new type of medicine for her family or the Executive who needs to keep an eye on industry and competitor information so that he can make the right decisions. It's all of us who would love to stay informed, but just don't know where to start.

Third, it reflects a broader question that has plagued Ashley and I for a while now. What makes people pay attention? What makes them stand up and take notice. How can (careful this might get a bit deep for a humble blog post) humanity make sure it's paying attention to what matters. To things that directly affect us but may not be immediately apparent. How can we fight against apathy and ignorance. How can people become more informed in a way that seems painless and even pleasurable.

The reason I bring up the slogan now is because I have another agenda. My agenda is a little off-topic but through my clever literary skills I have tied it back to Touchstone to justify my posting it here (got ya!).

You must go see "The Inconvenient Truth".

If it's still on a cinema anywhere near you (I know in my city for example, it is not on all screens and I had to drive out of my way to see it) then go pay some money and go see it. Don't download it, don't wait for the DVD and don't let people tell you it's just a lecture.

Vote with your wallet and check it out. Fight against apathy and ignorance and bring all your friends.

Its message is more urgent than terrorism and more catastrophic than potential nuclear war. It gives new meaning to "Mutual Assured Destruction".

The tail wagging the head

Recently I wrote a post called 'The head wagging the tail" about how Stephen Colbert (and others like him) in the mainstream are using platforms for long-tail publishing to create viral buzz about their shows.

Now, the opposite is happening. The long tail is manipulating the mainstream media by creating buzz with new forms of entertainment and then trying to leverage that audience into old-school forms of entertainment like talk shows and ultimately movies.

The first example of this is LonleyGirl15. Check out the latest story on TVSquad where the actress (recently outted as such) is going to appear on the Tonight Show to tell her story.

We're Hiring

Just a quick note to let you know that Faraday Media (the company that is working on Touchstone) is hiring!

So please head over to our 'Jobs' page to see if you might have a place in the team.

Jobs Page...

Algorithms Vs. Group Intelligence

I saw a Presentation/Q&A session with one of the Google founders who, when asked about his opinions about the (then) new trend of tagging responded with (and I paraphrase):

At Google we have always thought that computer algorithms should be responsible for indexing and classifying information for people rather than the other way around.

It struck me that this statement revealed a potentially growing philosophical divide between companies like Google who believe in machine based indexing, ranking and searching vs. the latest 'web 2.0' creations that seem to focus on explicit user/community interaction (and a belief in Group Intelligence) in order to achieve the same thing.

As far as I can tell, Google has resisted most forms of tagging in their applications while Web 2.0 apps continue to integrate it as one of their primary content classification methodologies.

While the question and answer was about tagging specifically, I think it applies more broadly.

For example, Google uses computer algorithms to determine which search results belong on the front page of a search and their news page uses yet more algorithms to work out what's 'front page news'. In fact, even some meme trackers have the same philosophy and use algorithms to discover and rank news and blogs – these include Tailrank, Techmeme and Technorati.

Digg and Wikipedia (as well as other similar sites), on the other hand, use direct human interaction on a mass scale. Group Intelligence.

However, I don't recall anyone ever saying 'I just got Tailranked'. Tailrank (and similar sites) do not seem to generate the level of traffic and interest as Digg has recently.

However, as most people know, Digg is in the middle of some controversy over their ranking systems which is causing many to wonder if ‘Group Intelligence’ (particularly when it comes to voting/popularity/value judgments) is actually just another name for Herd Mentality'?

With Touchstone, we have mainly made a bet on Algorithms in order to determine the 'Personal Relevancy' of an incoming item - but that's not to say that those algorithms can't take into account a broader set of factors including direct user rankings and feedback.

Constant Pile Reduction Mode (CPRM)

Ario has written a great tale of personal woe when it comes to dealing with piles. I will quote a little here:

Have you ever noticed how much of life consists of pile reduction? Tasks where your sole involvement is to take the pile, let's call that N, and make N = 0, where 0 is really 0, nothing... or some state of equilibrium.

He goes on to give an example of the piles in his life including:

• emails
• open tabs
• reading through rss feeds, blogs, friend's lists

Of course he also includes 'Trimming your nails' and 'Cutting Grass' - but the point is clear.

It struck me that our software seems to mimic our real-world pile reduction mentality.

As Ario writes - if only there were a way to let the information flow over us instead of having to 'mark feed as read'.

He has received a surprising number of comments on his post too - I think people are seriously stressed out by this problem!

What's on the horizon for IT Departments?

Mike Gotta posts another great article about the use of various presentation styles in order to deliver information in proportion to its importance and relevance to the user.

Having spoken to Mike before, I know he's a smart guy - and he is making great strides in explaining attention management to enterprises.

While Touchstone is not strictly targeted at the Enterprise, it seems that, like Google, individuals in the enterprise may decide to adopt it in their workplace anyway.

A Matter of Attention & Focus

Here's a quote:

Activities in the forefront zone have the highest focus for users. This means that users' attention is also at its highest level and they spend the most time monitoring changes in those activities. At the other extreme are horizon items. These have the lowest level of focus, the least level of attention and the least amount of time checking for new information and communication channels

Simple but beautiful

This is a simple but beautiful little site. And Back to the future is on the home page - so that just makes it great. Best Stuff in the World!

Via FewAgainstMany

Update: I just read their blog and found out they're fellow Australians - great stuff!

The web as a platform - With Touchstone Alerts

Recently the issue of client-side vs. server-side has been foremost in our mind. It's been a hot topic internally and most recently Read/Write Web did a story comparing the two worlds citing Touchstone as an example of software that bridged the gap between the web world and the desktop world.

I think this message is key. The new, evolving web operating system is an important paradigm change. Loosely coupled applications that deliver a host of services (many that were once provided on the desktop) are already changing the way we think about software.

Ultimately though, the web delivery mechanism - the browser - has limitations. I like to call it a sandbox. Your web applications can play in the sandbox but they never really matter. They never quite make a difference in the 'real world'.

Sure this might change when the loose couplings become less loose, and the standards become better defined (like Ray Ozzie's web clipboard and Microformats) but ultimately the browser's paging and post-back model (if you like it or not even Ajax requires posting back to a server to get most of its info) can never come close to achieving the 'escalating alerts' that we achieve with Touchstone.

The ability for a semi-transparent, non focus stealing alert to appear on your desktop while you work is simply not possible (not to mention the ability to index your HDD looking for Attention Data) from the browser.

Also, God forbid you browse to another page. Then the web-app has lost all hope of reaching the user until they come back or check their spam filled inbox (or one of their ever increasing widgets stuck firmly on the wallpaper behind all their 'real' applications)

In short - the Touchstone team passionately believes in the web. We even believe in the evolving web operating system. We believe in it so much that we are building Touchstone as a desktop application.

How does that make sense? It makes sense because we believe all those web-based applications will need a way to alert the user 'beyond the browser sandbox'.

As Richard said on Read/Write Web:

"There is a place for both webified desktop apps and browser-based apps. Indeed the browser is basically just a desktop app at its most generic."

If the browser is the desktop app that lets you view web-based apps, then Touchstone is the desktop app that lets you view alerts from web-based sources.

Touchstone in the Australian Financial Review

Touchstone was mentioned in today's edition of the Australian Financial Review. A big thanks must go out to Mark Jones for his eloquent explanation of what we do.

We've spent 6 months trying to find ways to boil it down into a simple explanation and he did it in a few days - genius!

This is a great quote:

"Touchstone reduces rivers of information to a trickle"

and this...

"Co-founder Chris Saad described Touchstone as 'an attention management engine' for busy people who deal with a constant stream of incoming information.

They are working in Word trying to produce a document and want to get a heads-up display of their life"

or this...

"... The software is one of the first tangible results of a movement that has been brewing in Silicon Valley circles for the past few years."

New Touchstone Site Online

Hi everyone - just a quick note to let you know that I just published a new site for Touchstone. So maybe it's time to click through from your feed readers and give us some more page views :)

Check it out here!.

Thank you for your patronage.

The Dialog Platform

The ambition of this project is awe inspiring. I can't wait to see the ongoing results.

Dropping Knowledge

How Liberals and Conservatives think

This is a fascinating talk about the way liberals and conservatives think. More broadly it's an interesting discussion about how perceptions and points of view as 'frameworks' can change the way people make decisions and establish their idea of morality and decision making. George Lakoff on Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think

10 things you should be monitoring

One of the usage scenarios for Touchstone is keeping track of conversations about your business, people and products. You could do this by setting up persistent searches/RSS feeds via various blog tracking services and using Touchstone to get desktop alerts while you work. So in that spirit, I thought this post was rather interesting!

10 things you should be monitoring

Via Resonance Partnership

Video Podcast conversation - From Old Media to Attention Management

On G'day World Video Edition with Cameron Reilly, Cam interviews Mark Jones (IT Editor of the Australian Financial Review) and Hugh Martin (Editor of News.com.au) about the state of newspapers and leads a conversation that takes us from old media to the long-tail and the resulting information explosion.

The conversation abruptly ends just as Mark hits the nail on the head when he mentions that the power will soon be in the Participant’s (not the big brands) hands. Participants will have tools to create a filter their media experience to match their individual tastes.

For some reason Cameron doesn't seem to like that idea though - I wonder why?

Check it out here on the G'day world site.

Update: A PDF about the changes in the newspaper industry.

The head wagging the tail

The mainstream is using the long-tail to create buzz and further drive the impact of 'big hits'. It just goes to show that, at the end of the day, the head and the tail must live together - or neither will be very exciting at all (try shaking your tail without involving your head/brain).

Yet another example of this trend is the producers of lost using the lost website to distribute fragments - fragments that YouTube users have taken it upon themselves to assemble.

Read more about it at TVSquad 'Joined clips from Hanso Exposed - VIDEO'.

Perhaps the long tail does not mean the end of the hit, just a better quality mainstream product supported by many, many niche creations as well.

Could being a Neilson family kill you?

Until now, Stephen Colbert's amazing and ingenious use of the net and the growing participant culture to promote his show has been a beautiful thing to watch. But it was never beyond my imagination. If I were in his place I'd be doing the same thing. But I just watched the intro to the Colbert Report episode 08.21.2006 and his intro took it over the edge for me. By itself maybe it was just another funny/clever comment, but when added to the sum total of Wikipedia jokes, Green screen antics and his other 'buzz' generating stunts, you get a very beautiful picture.

His intro comment was "Could being a Neilson family kill you? Watch the entire show to find out".

Genius. Subtle, relevant, clever and could even have a direct affect on his rating for the night.

I love that guy so much - in a straight, non-sexual way of course.

He is climbing fast to join my other masters:

• Joss Whedon
• Ronald D. Moore
• Jon Stewart
• And all the people leading the charge with Current.TV (including Al Gore)

J.J. Abrams might be on the list soon, depending on what he does with Star Trek - but right now he is a little too disconnected for my taste.

I think Colbert, however, should be the new member of the 'Oh my god, you're changing traditional media by being a legend' club.

In Episode 08.23.2006 he even goes on to talk about the fragmentation of media experiences due to the explosion of choices going so far as to bring a band on that uses YouTube as its primary promotion vehicle. I think he understands the principal of 'Audiences of One' better than most traditional media personalities.

New build of Touchstone has been published!

Hey all, here was the official email:

Touchstone Alpha Testing Invite
Subscribe to information that matters, set rules for what's important and keep track of your news and alerts in one all-purpose heads-up-display

The latest version of Touchstone is available for download and we'd like to invite you to participate in testing and providing feedback.

• What is Touchstone - Read the Manifesto
• Where do I get a Copy - Download Here
• How do I provide feedback - On the forums
• Want to win an XBOX 360 - Develop an adapter
  

Download Touchstone here

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas on the forums or by return email.

Kind regards,

The Touchstone Team

The annoying thing is, however, that Gmail and Outlook 2007 seems to be junking the invites as spam. So if you didn't get your invite, then please download the app from the link above and just use the email address you subscribed to the mailing list with.

Didn't subscribe to the mailing list? Then you can download the app - but you won't be able to get past the first screen - email me for an invite.

This spam problem is driving me nuts! Anyone have any ideas how to get past the filters?

What is Attention Data? A description for Mom and Dad.

With Touchstone we focus less on Attention Data and more on creating an Attention Profile. What's the difference? Attention Data is all the breadcrumbs you leave behind when you interact with your computer (and your life) while your Attention Profile is the resulting 'boiled down' profile of your interests.

But it never hurts to get an understanding of what Attention Data is in the first place. The first stop should be our manifesto.

Also, there is a great post that has a simple explanation of Attention Data for your Mom and Dad - What is Attention Data.

Of course, Attention Data and Attention Profiles are useless unless you can apply them to something useful.

Via SemifiktiveHalbwahrheiten

People powered news - Done

According to Alan Gray at News Blaze the battle for the People Powered news business (ala Digg) is over. There are 5 top players and many of the rest are dead or dieing.

I'm not sure I agree or disagree with the statement. I do know, however, that aggregating a collective picture of popularity for news (whether it is done by votes like Digg, or by incoming links and meme tracking like tailrank and techmeme) is only part of the solution. An import part, but not the whole picture.

While we all want to know what the 'next big thing' is (or in Digg's case what the 'current big thing is - at least for the next 5 minutes'), we also want to know what's of most interest to the most important person of all - ourselves.

As I said in my previous post - and many times before - there is "What's popular", and then there is "What's Personally Relevant". I think they are both important problems to tackle however in the rush to create 'me too' services, "What's Personally Relevant" is being overlooked.

With Publishing 2.0 creating massive amounts of content about every imaginable topic - from my local golf club to world wide industry trends, we need to find a way to generate a view of world-wide content that is specifically tailored to our tastes and needs.

I'd like to see an RSS feed of items that I care about. Personally. Me. Not everyone else... not my social network... me.

Obviously Touchstone is making great strides in this direction. We even (optionally) syndicate the results back out to your very own RSS feed. We call it Pebbles. It's coming in the next build of Touchstone.

Why aren't you paying enough attention to me ;(

Nick Carr has recently posted about the 'great unread'. The basic premise is that the blog A-list are turning into a force not unlike the old-media whereby they 'own' the readership and the rest of the blogs don't really count.

He has it wrong. Putting aside fundamental facts such as:

1. Blogging is about joining an open, two-way conversation. Old-media would never have allowed such a thing.
2. As Michael Arrington says "those people with interesting things to say tend to get listened to. Those that don’t…don’t"
3. As Shel says "At no point and in no space is there some Committee of the Anointed A-List sitting in a top down boardroom deciding who should link and who should be linked to"
   

There is a better, more compelling reason why the size of your audience and a blog's place in the 'A-List' is irrelevant (in broad terms).

Blogging is not about superstars; it's about individuals. It's the long tail of publishing. The top 100 is less important than the top 1 million - or more.

People and companies around the world start blogging not to get on the A-list, but rather to say something to their immediate audience. Even if that is an audience of one.

'Most Readers' will never beat 'Most personally relevant'. My local school's blog has more relevance to me than the A-list blog about schooling hosted by a stranger on the other side of the world.

When content is structured the way that blogging+rss has structured it, particpants (what used to be called 'the audience') get a chance to have a voice right alongside both the old-media and the A-list.

Ultimately the goal of blogging should be that participants can find content that is not just popular, but most personally relevant.

Update: Stowe takes the most balanced view so far with "A house divided against itself cannot stand... or can it?".