Category Archive: attention
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Battle the bloat
All this talk around the “noisy” or “bloated” blogosphere had me thinking about a strategy to manage ones Attention distribution. I have a regular J-O-B and my spare time is very limited between a young wife, sideline projects and sleep, so I need to make this is efficient as possible.
Lets have a look at my reading habits:
In general the type of reading I do can split into 2 large categories, firstly there is the current news category which consists mainly of up-to-the-date info on current affairs, if you read it a week later it would be old news. Secondly there are the feeds that I read (not too many!) of a bunch of local bloggers as well as others that post more long form, insightful and interesting posts, which will have a longer shelf life.
So this is how I think I will manage this lot from now on:
* Assign 3 slots for current news sites like Engadget and memetrackers, I find that having a lower quantity of these is ok as long as you pick the right ones. These get handled the same way I read newspapers, first thing in the morning.
* Assign a limited number of slots for other regular sites containing more long term value (Think Doc Searls, NewSome.org here), with these sites it won’t matter if I don’t hit them everyday, I can always catch up later. I think around 30 slots will suffice. These become like the novels and non-fiction works on my bedside table, I get to them when I get to them.
* Rotate these slots, once a month pick one or two feeds that you don’t like as much as before or that have gone dead and swap out with a couple if interesting ones that may have come up via other sources (I find a lot of new stuff via links on the blogs that I read), it may be worth keeping 5 or 10 up and coming feeds in a B-Pool for later upgrading. Remember you can always swap back an old favorite if you feel the need.
* Try and read in some sort of order, it is often tempting to go to your top 10 feeds first, but try and cycle through your list of 30+ in an orderly fashion, this way you won’t get into a situation where you have tons of unreads on some and other privileged feeds are up to date, remember there may be JUST as much value elsewhere, and remember, you have time!
Tips to bloggers to keep my Attention:
* Give me full feeds, its way more productive than having to click and load a blog site.
* Get to the point, long form post are nice, but keep it under 2 minutes of reading time.
* Stop writing to me as though I am an academic, remember that huge portions of the world do not speak english natively, I like a nice vocabulary as much as the next guy, but there has to be some limits, ok 
* Tell me what you mean by actually saying it, don’t write long complex posts wrapped up in metaphors that only you and your immediate circle of friends “get”.
* Don’t get into stupid blogospats, they just waste my time. Be constructive, not destructive.
* Appear human once a while, crack a joke, tell me about your weekend, make me feel like a friend not a statistic.
Flooding the Blogosphere
Seth Godin thinks that we are posting to much noise on the blogosphere. (via A VC)
Kent Newsome also weighs in and says:
Asking the citizenry of the blogosphere (far too many of whom are chasing the almighty dollar) to be reasoned in their use of the shared blogosphere is like asking people not to litter.
What Kent is saying is of course true, there is just no way we are going to turn around from the current curve, people will post more and more, and the topics will become more and more diverse. What we have here is the age old problem of eyeballs, yes, that is a marketing 1.0 term and it is still relevant. How do we expose the value of the increasingly long tail. Seth says that a focused and author filtered blog will end up with fewer, but more loyal and consequently valuable readers, but does that mean that it should end there?
The other side of the coin is the argument for memetrackers and tagging as well as custom filters helping us out, but to tell you the truth I find the signal to noise ratio on these things to be equally low, although they are not far off.
What do I think the solution is? Simple. Collaborative filtering. Many years ago there used to exist a movie rating site (I think it was called movielobby.com back then), they had a movie rating system where you could feed it with movies that you liked, then based on what other people have rated it would do some simple maths and suggest you a couple movies to watch. Simple, and it worked. What was more is that the more you used it, the more accurate it got.
This is what we need, I have been working on some sort of solution for this the last couple of weeks, when I have time. I have a technology base figured out, that’s the easy part, but how do I make this work in the real-world. I have been thinking of a browser plugin, it needs to be really simple to rate blog posts on a scale of “This grabbed my attention” to “This left me cold”, the system will then take your ratings and match your profile to these of thousands of like-minded people and suggest posts for you, via RSS (number and frequency configurable). Kind of like a personal memetracker.
What do you think, sound like it could work?
Wanted Ads 2.0
In his usual way Doc Searls turns the Attention Economy on his head and indicates that the ideal end-case for all of this Attention seeking should be that we turn it all around and settle on what he calls Intention.
This is interesting because it is very much a reverse of the current thinking in the Attention realm. The focus shifts from Seller to Buyer, the buyer needs to be able to express his need to pay Attention.
While many of these services already exist, like Orbitz, Doc says that we should move away from anyone owning these “Silos” and that they should become “OpenSource” and based on such standards and software. It needs to be available for free syndication and aggregation.
I like this idea, are we looking at “Wanted Ads 2.0″?
I think that marketers, product development teams and other things so dependant on trend analysis and quite often “gut feel” could really benefit from having a publicly owned and measurable metric of our buying intentions. With this I am not saying that everything that people want is automatically a good business proposition, we often don’t know what is best and get quite good at ruling out practicality and little things like cost etc. !
Yes, it is possible that it may never be able to reach this utopia of the Intention world, but it can’t hurt to have a goal to work towards, can it.
Keep an eye on this space!
Pay Attention to Dave
Congratulations to Dave Duarte, a colleague of mine.
Last nite, he made a well received speech at toastmasters. The speech was entitled “Paying Attention, Earning Attention” and a transcribe can be found here.
Well done Dave.
Technorati Tags: attention
I see you, they see me. Crosslinking in the real world.
Wired Blogs took notice of this article on the New York Magazine website entitled Linkology.
It has a nice graphic explaining in detail the cross-linking between the Top 50 blogs out there at the moment.
Download the PDF of data compiled by technorati and have a look around, it reveals a complicated mesh of cross-linking even between seemingly unrelated blogs.
Seems that while it may be seen as evil by some blogrolling or as i like to call it, “spreading the love”, is very effecient at driving traffic to your site and affiliates, no matter how bizzarre the relationship. Do I hear that “attention” bell again?