Your Attention Profile - The Non-Evil Way

Aaron Mentele from FeedRinse has posted about APML.

He says:

"Chris Saad and Ashley Angell of Faraday Media / Touchstone have introduced a standard format for attention data. I’ve had a chance to look through the APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) proposal, and short of seeing the word Profiling and noticing email address as an attribute in the profile, it looks promising. I can see a benefit to having an agreed-upon format for attention profiles, similar to the HL7 spec for personal health information."

It's a great read about Attention Profiling in general - check it out.

Phil Morle says "We need time to think"

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...

Does Media 2.0 Scale? When do we reach Saturation?

I have had this question in the back of my mind for a month now.

"Does Media 2.0 Scale"

If one of the tenets of being in 'Social Media' is for everyone to be... well... social - at one point does your ability to socialize reach saturation point?

To me, Robert Scoble is the best example of this emerging problem.

It seems to me that he is the ultimate Social Media 'celebrity'. He takes his social responsibility seriously. He lists his cell phone and email address on his website and responds to most of his email. He blogs like crazy and comments on blogs that mention him. He talks on panels and joins all sorts of crazy workgroups.

And now... he is adding every single one of his followers on Twitter as a friend!

This is at once both admirable and crazy. How can he possible keep up?

Surely he has (or soon will) reach the limits of his social scale.

I'd like to ask Robert, as one of Media 2.0's leading social celebrities, to write a post about how he deals with all these people coming at him asking for attention - how does he Pay Attention to everyone.

Consider also that if Robert is the new model of celebrity - where the host of your favourite TV show needs to be accessible and social - how does this kind of activity scale to mainstream levels.

Fill us in Robert!

What does everyone else think? Perhaps this is a follow on from the 'My Media Consumption Diet' meme. How do you decide what to ignore and how do you try to scale up your social interactions. How is it possible for more visible people to do the same. How can all of this 'level up' when social becomes mainstream?

Maybe scale is not a desirable effect though? If we scale our interactions up - do we not necessarily have to scale the depth of those interactions down?

The rise of technology addiction

BBCs Click website has recently published an article about Technology Addiction. I think I have a problem ;)

Prof Kakabadse added: "It's addiction to portable technology, which you take with you practically to bed, the cinema, to the theatre, to a dinner party. The symptoms are, like with any other addiction, that people spend more time using their technology than spending it in socialising or in family time."

Also there is a good section dedicated to how the medium is the message.

For instance, an e-mail can wait two days to be answered but a text message demands an almost immediate reply.

Stefana Broadbent from Swisscom said: "E-mail is considered the most formal. At the other end of the spectrum SMS is the most personal of all.

"That's where we find all those little exchanges, little endearments, what we call grooming, which is sending: 'I think about you. How did it go? How did you sleep?'

He added: "That is actually given by the number of characters. With such few characters, you have to have a lot of mutual understanding and mutual knowledge."

But it's not all bad news... apparently it forces us to get smarter.

"Studies have been done showing that people can actually enhance their cognitive abilities, which helps them to process more information at the same time. And their performance even transfers to other tasks."

Perhaps one day we can just double space our brains and jack a fibre optic cable into our ears.

Thoughts by Michael Holdhaber

Michael is often referred to as the Father of Attention.

He has made some great posts recently so I thought I would share:

A New Brief Set of Attention Economy “Laws”

Attention and the "Knowledge Economy"

Attention: You CAN Take It With You

Announcing initial participants for the APML Workgroup

An initial set of participants in the APML Workgroup have been announced. 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.

It is a fantastic group to start with and we are all very excited to get the ball rolling.

They are:

• Mitch Ratcliffe (Co-Founder, Buzzlogic)
• Chris Messina (Citizen Agency)
• Daniela Barbosa (Solutions Architect, Dow Jones)
• Phil Morle (VP Attention, Yoick)
• Ben Metcalfe (Social Media Consultant)
• Chris Saad/Ashley Angell (Co-Founders, Faraday Media/Touchstone)
• Paul Jones (Senior Architect, Faraday Media/Touchstone)

The APML Workgroup is tasked with converting the current specification into an agreed standard. We invite all the players in or around the "Attention Economy" to join us in realizing 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...

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

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

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.

FeedBurner Feed Reading Stats

The Moral of feedburner's latest round of stats for me is this:

1. If you want to get lots of subscribers - get on some default fead reader lists so that your feed is bundled with all new accounts.
2. Google Reader and Bloglines are winning in the feed reading space
3. There is a huge difference between having subscribers and having (Feedburner's definition of) engagement with your audience.
4. Does someone want to bundle our feed or the Media 2.0 Workgroup feed? :)

I think there is a another way to find your audience.

My Media Consumption Diet

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.

More Buzz around Town for Touchstone

Touchstone and APML have been mentioned in quite a few places in the last week or so. Here are some of the highlights....

From TechZoogle

"this is an invaluable tool that simplifies the process of research for academics and professionals alike. It is not meant to replace the RSS Reader in anyway, but it does improve workflow/ productivity by acting as an intelligent personalized “tipster” right on your desktop and one that gives you up to date persistent information. Being a heavy RSS reader/ user, I found it filtered a good amount of news based on my keywords and preferences. Touchstone is a powerful app that is going to be a permanent addition to my desktop tools and daily research setup."

From Daniela Barbosa

Last night i hit the jackpot via my personal filtered Touchstone tool that i am using during their BETA period (see below note). In the post titled "Web 2.0 applied in an Enterprise – a huge business opportunity" Peter Reiser lays out beautifully how a company like Sun Microsystems is looking to take advantage of the social dynamics of Web 2.0 and turn it into a business value and business advantage.

[...]

Note: Here is a perfect example of the way a tool like Touchstone has helped me be alerted to something that i might have missed- based on the feeds i have inputted via my OPML file (i have had the complete SUN Blogroll on my GoogleReader for ever but there is just so much on a daily basis i find it very hard to find what is personally important unless i subscribe to Sun individual blogs). With Touchstone and key terms i might be looking for- in this case client names and key words like 'enterprise 2.0' the information was delivered to me via a news ticker of things that are important to me. Without it, i wouldn't know that Peter Reiser was blogging on a subject that is dear to me. Touchstone is in Private Beta- i still have a couple of guest invitation and if you are interested please do drop me a line (danielavbarbosa[at]gmail.com).

From TwoPointTouch

Rose confirmed that digg is actively mining users’ attention data in order to implement these changes. He professed ignorance of APML, but “there are a couple of engineers deeply into this stuff” back at digg HQ.

Thanks to everyone who takes the time to blog about Touchstone - you are instrumental in spreading the word about our baby! It is very much appreciated.

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

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.

Scouta - Word-of-mouth media recommendations Web 2.0 style

Ever wondered what it would be like if you could get Amazon style recommendations about all forms of media across the net (yes even podcasts)?

Richard Giles a fellow Australian Web 2.0 junkie has created just such a thing. It's called Scouta and it just went live today.

From the home page:

There's nothing more powerful than a word-of-mouth recommendation. That's why Scouta uses recommendations from you and like-minded people to help find a needle in a haystack or a video in YouTube.

Find out more in our about page.

Get on and feed your media addiction (and then join me in the 12 step program).

Well done Richard!

Are you paying attention?

I wonder how one could get an instant invite to Touchstone Beta...

Are you paying attention?

Loosely Coupled Relationships - is there any deeper meaning anymore?

I have written before about the Disintegration of Reality.

Here's some of that original post:

"Reality is disintegrating. No wait hear me out.

Granular parts of our established systems are being dislodged from their containers and only reforming via temporary, loosely coupled connections.

Content is being disintegrated from the Page, TV and Radio via RSS and Microformats.

Functionality is being disintegrated from applications (loosely coupled mashups are starting to overshadow complete applications).

People are being disintegrated from families. Divorce is now common place and starting to lose its taboo. As a result families are forming all sorts of strange and lopsided combinations where ex’s and steps come together for special occasions and in support of ‘the children’. At all times, however, the individual seems to be achieving more freedom and importance than the ‘family unit’."

Another way to phrase this perhaps is "Loosely Coupled Relationships" much like RSS and REST are loosely coupled APIs that allow us to mash stuff up.

I have been having more thoughts on this issue recently and just now saw something that promoted me to write about it. I just saw an interview with a group of bloggers and the Nun that looks after the Vatican website (recorded by fellow Media 2.0 Workgroup member Robert Scoble).

In reference to the Internet building new types of communities she related a story of one of the first Skype calls she witnessed. In it, one of her colleagues made a call to someone in china. She went on to say (and I paraphrase).

"That exchange [the call to China with some random person], had a very personal component, an emotional component. It had something that brought out something from within that person - he gave it to that person in China, and then what happened?

We need to distinguish between creating something that builds relationship and something that is just dumping out all kinds of energy that has no place to go... It's energy that we need to integrate into something real."

I have been wondering about this for some time. It seems to me that a growing number of tools are being released that allow us to have surface style, loosley coupled relationships.

The most extreme example of this is Twitter. With Twitter I don't need to actually care enough about someone to ask how their day was. I can just have a passive overview of their activities as they release updates into the ether. If I choose to catch what they are sending I am free - but I am also equally free to ignore it. It is very non-committal.

An earlier technology also provided this level of disconnect. SMS (at least here in Australia) has in many cases started to take the place of phone calls because SMS is less confrontational and committal. You could do other things while having a 'conversation' with someone. Ignoring an incoming SMS is also (usually) perfectly fine - even more so than ignoring an IM message in some cases.

The same is true for MySpace. Look at a myspace comments section and you will see lots of fruitless and surface style interactions that seem to go nowhere.

It seems to me that these sorts of passive or group interaction mechanisms, while creating one type community, may - taken to their logical extreme - negatively affect another much deeper level of connection.

Maybe these loosely coupled relationships were never destined to be any deeper than a twitter message. Or maybe, this type of behaviour will expand to include loved ones and friends who used to require more commitment.

Personally I wonder if there isn't a way to harness this energy and capture it for good. For deeper connections. Or at least to reveal the deeper connections that are already present.

In the rush to create more democratic, social and distributed media, I'd hate to think that our one-to-one relationships will end up as nothing more than temporary mashups - like ships passing in the night.

Twitter me with your thoughts (no just kidding - comments are fine).

Attention Streams - Your life in feed

Stowe Boyd just pointed me to posts that Emily Chang and He (separately) just posted about Data streams.

From Emily Chang's post.

For now, this activity stream idea is providing the start to a holistic view of my activity across online networks: both my own and the ones I use. In turn, this acts as a conduit for you, the reader. Rather than just a static “recommended links” page or a blogroll, the data stream opens up my activity to you in semi-realtime and at one website.

They are both interesting posts on Personal Aggregation. There is a service called Jaiku which does much of the same thing without the databasing and searching.

I personally don't see the aggregation of multiple feeds as anything too amazing. That's what a feed reader does. The more interesting improvement is the fact that the data is then re-syndicated to a single, aggregated feed. But Touchstone has been doing that for months and months. And any feed splicing service can do it easily. Our feed also includes ranks for how 'Personally Relevant' each of the items were.

The final step that seemed interesting to Emily was databasing the results and searching on them later - that would be an easy output adapter to make.

Stowe has focused on the idea of routing items to other applications so you can take action on your attention stream. This too would be a simple matter of writing an output adapter to trap Microformats etc from Touchstone. In fact it's been on our adapter ideas page for ages. It's been there since before I can remember.

Once we release the updated SDK to developers they should be made in short order.

As a bonus, Touchstone would also alert you to important changes in your stream.

Might have to chat to my mate Stowe about the project he is cooking up - could be room to work together on it!

A revolution is stirring

A fantastic piece has been posted by Marianne about Social Media.

I won't dare try to summarize it. It has a beautiful depth and breadth of scope helping to put all of this in context.

Check it out - "Social Media: Something Different IS Happening..."

It reminds me of the Media 2.0 Roadmap I did - but far more eloquent and less clinical.

Live in Chicago - Check out SOBCon 07

SOBCon 07 is happening in Chicago in May so if you're in the area check it out.

Overview
An evening and a day of community, strategy, and information about the art, technology, and science of relationship blogging for 250 experienced bloggers.

Purpose
We will demonstrate to 250 bloggers how to take their existing blogs to the next level through interactive presentations on publishing, design and branding, tools, analytics, social networking, marketing, and coaching, from the perspectives of the blogger and the audience.

Sounds right up Touchstone's ally!

If you are in Chicago and would like to go represent Touchstone please drop me a line at chris@touchstonelive.com.

Cheers!

Via: Logic+Emotion

Thanks to Toby for pointing this out to me!

Adobe launches MyFeedz

Adobe Labs has launched a 'Social Newspaper' called MyFeedz. It seems to be a very nice looking Findory type service.

It's great to see people experimenting with Attention Data. They too, however, are locking you into their service and don't let you export your Attention Profile.

Thanks to Marjolein for pointing me to this.

Will Widgets and RSS hit the mainstream?

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 asks yet another interesting question on his blog.

"Will Widgets hit a Mainstream Wall just like RSS?"

From his post:

"But I was struck by how widgets, like RSS, are really more of a boon for online publishers than for average folks. Widgets, like RSS, are great for syndicating information, or in the case of widgets, also application functions. But for average users, they are only useful for aggregating on a start page, and really, how often do most people change their start pages?"

Widgets and Gadgets are names used interchangeably for stuff that you can put on your blog/myspace account and stuff you can put on your desktop.

In regard to the Desktop widgets, here's what I think of widgets.

In regard to RSS, our newly updated website sheds some light.

In the 'Got a Mom?" section, it says:

"[To hit the mainstream] RSS has to become brain dead simple to use." - Fred Wilson

Do your parents know how to find and subscribe to RSS feeds? Should they? Do they know how to read HTML? Of course not; they "browse the web". RSS needs to be that simple.

Touchstone makes RSS dead simple by taking the subscribing out of the equation. Get your mum to quickly and easily type in her interests into a little textbox and Touchstone does the rest.

Like Scott goes on to say in his post:

"Now, none of this means that widgets, like RSS, won’t revolutionize the world of web publishing (although I’m skeptical of Tariq Krim prediction that widgets will kill web pages) — it’s just that it will be transparent to the average web user."

He's exactly right.

Widgets, like RSS, are usually technical and always overwhelming in an information consumption sense. They are great for myspace bling, but to actually get productive information you need something far more intelligent.