SuperNova 2005: Attention!

The Attention panel was moderated by Steve Gillmor (ZDNet, Gillmor Gang and Gillmor Daily) and involved Glenn Reid (FiveAcross); Doree Duncan Seligmann (Avaya); David Sifry (Technorati) and Linda Stone (Ex-Microsoft and Apple). The stated subject is:

Attention is one immutably scarce quantity in a world of increasing abundance. As everything becomes connected, and connectivity becomes increasingly widespread, the challenge in no longer getting more information, but getting less. We need tools, systems, and practices to help us cope with information overload. Fortunately, advances in this area are coming from several directions, ranging from communications systems to search-based technologies for managing and organizing information.

Linda Stone kicked-off the panel by a quick introduction. She cornered about ten years ago the term "Continuous Partial Attention" - which means that we stretch our attention to cope with a primary interest (discussion, conference, this panel) whilst browsing around for secondary interest - just to make sure we do not miss anything (crackberry, cell phone,...). Communication tools and gadgets have enslaved us to a point that they compromise productivity, creativity and decision making. This has led companies to declare "Email-free Fridays", "Attention policies for meetings", etc.  "Being connected is what makes us feel alive", and CPA is a derived consequence of it. Detailed notes of Linda's introduction are here.

The rest of these notes are a verbatim transcription of some comments expressed by the panelists.

Glen Reid: Started at Adobe for 20 years, and then moved to Apple, building desktop publishing software and iPhoto/iMovie. Asserts that humans are the best filters, and therefore using people as referrers of interesting topics and recommendations is the most relevant.

Doris Duncan Seligmann: How to inject some humanity in computer-based interaction systems. Built the first multimedia interactive video-conferencing system that would include artefacts/avatars showing that human are involved in the conversation.

David Sifry: Time is a scarce resource, that needs to be "spent" wisely and efficiently. Analogy to stock markets analysis to asses time allocation. Using computers to track what we do, read, click on, without changing human's behavior is a way to collect data that will eventually be aggregated and used to direct our attention - based on what we do, and our friends/colleagues do. How can we leverage the time people spend (reading blogs) to our advantage.

Linda Stone: Leisure time is what makes us human, and she is concerned to overemphasis on time efficiency. Example: we looked at maximizing children's playtime, activities, etc. whereas now we actually limit children's exposure to craziness and heavy schedule.

Steve Gillmor: The point is to optimize the time we spend on non-leisure activities, so that we have more time to "play".

Glenn Reid: There is no such thing as an event-driven world, in which you are working and are getting interrupted. You are actually working in a flow of information, doing a number of things at the same time, and essentially dealing with interruptions as normal inputs.

(Got distracted by an email, left a comment on Buzznet, and responded to an IM message)

David Sifry: We all own our attention data (clicks, reads,...) and whilst it is OK for service providers to host them, fundamentally it is ours (the users). This attention data needs to be expressed in a way that makes it easy to aggregate it across streams and providers. This is what attention.xml is about: a simple file format expressing what I have been spending time on.

Glenn Reid: Contends that such data is not being recorded. And gets ran over by the rest of the panel that mentions all the tracking made by Yahoo, Google, MSN, eBay, Amazon,...

Doree Duncan Seligmann: Avaya has developed Personal Workspaces that manages workers availability, interruptability,... and manage flows of phone calls according to these parameters.

Steve Gillmor polls the audience about the use of an RSS aggregators. Just a few hands are raised by people not using one. A large proportion is using a client aggregator, which is interesting since my stats say clearly otherwise. And there is strong interest in synchronizing all read marks across systems, devices and programs.

Note that this feature will be available from NewsGator in their forthcoming release (across web, outlook and mobile). But that is one from vendor only at this point, and attention.xml should hopefully allow us to get this same functionality across the industry.

One aspect not addressed by the panel is how attention.xml will be implemented, and when we'll start seeing it included in commercial products, besides Yahoo's efforts.

Update: Check out John Hagel's note on The Aphrodisiac of Attention.

Tag: supernova2005

Comments

[Greg Linden]

Great post, Jeff. Thanks for making these notes available.

I was surprised to here that David Sifry said that behavior "will eventually be aggregated and used to direct our attention." Sites like Amazon and Findory are doing this already, learning from your behavior and helping you focus on the information you want. There is no "eventually"; the future is already here.

Greg Linden, Founder & CEO, Findory.com

[Jeff Clavier]

Greg> I guess that the difference Dave and Steve were pointing to is that attention and collaborative filtering will work across systems, as opposed to one product/web site. You are right in pointing out that Findory, Rojo, Amazon.com and quite a few others already do this. But the point is to have cross-attention integration.

Enjoy Gnomedex :-).