Attensa

Newsgator Toolbar and Attensa - Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Apparently the Attensa toolbars we introduced more than a year ago for tagging, identifying, previewing and subscribing to feeds and our tagging toolbar are pretty good ideas.

Newsgator just announced a beta of their toolbar today.

With the Attensa browser toolbar you can:

- identify all of the feeds available on a page
- preview the feed and articles to see if you want to subscribe
- subscribe with a click
- access all of your feeds and articles in your browser
- tag articles and synchronize with del.icio.us

Here's a duplicate of a post I wrote in December 2005 describing the wonders of the Attensa toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The Chiclet problem surfaces at the Syndicator Blog. The rash of badges is totally out of hand.

Attensa has another approach to finding feeds and easily subscribing from a Web page or blog from your browser.

We use a toolbar in IE or Firefox to identify feeds and to let you see what kinds of articles are available before deciding to subscribe. This eliminates the need to clutter a page with branded badges. On the one hand this may not be the brightest marketing move on Attensa's part... but it sure makes sense from a user's perspective.

Here's a screenshot of Attensa auto feed detection at work:

 

And here's the feed preview

Let us know what you think.

P.S. Thanks for letting us know it's a great idea, Newsgator.

Flog Blog: Goodbye Bookmarks!

I'm the head of Customer Service at Attensa. The other day, my boss (you know, that Scott guy) wandered into my office and told me to blog.

OK.

I get pretty busy testing things and logging issues, but every day I hear and read and discover things about Attensa for Outlook that make me love my job. So, I can blog. Here we go...

I used to build catalogs of bookmarks. My bookmark file has travelled from computer to computer as I've upgraded my home office over the years, becoming ever more bloated and less organized. I'm a messy person. I have stacks of papers and kids toys and art projects living on my desk. I will never take the time to open my bookmarks file and clean it up properly... the best I can do is make a half-hearted attempt to purge broken website links once in a while.

Then along came tagging... wow! My life has suddenly changed!

I love tags. As I work through my feeds in Attensa for Outlook, I can tag articles on the fly to use later.... and the cool thing is, I get to make up my own tags (keywords) that work for my brain. When I'm working through my various projects and I need to put my hands on information quick, finding a web page in my catalog is as simple as pulling down the Attensa Tags menu and looking under the most logical keyword. No more hunting under bookmark sub-folders looking for a bookmarked site. With tagging, I don't lose web pages anymore. I use my del.icio.us account with Attensa so I have access to my tagged items from any computer.

Tip:
Attensa's River of News has its own tagging button, on the article toolbar, making it really easy to save that article for later. When you tag the article, a link to the web page itself is created in your tags, not a link to the article in Outlook.

P.S. My boss made me write this.

Enterprise 2.0 - Blogs, Wikis and RSS

The Spring issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review has a terrific overview of how blogs, wikis and group messaging software are defining Enterprise 2.0 - Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

The author, Andrew P McAfee, an associate professor with the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School, coins a new acronym -- SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions and signals) to describe the tools and communication patterns that are essential to building highly collaborative environments that can drive productivity to new levels.

You can buy a copy of the report here.

Attensa for Outlook includes the features that top the must-list for business class RSS readers necessary to track and monitor the signals

• persistent search tools
• easy to use tagging, auto-feed detection and preview
• ability to handle secure feeds
• one click blog publishing

 

Information Overload on Scobelizer by Bubba

So Scoble's new guest blogger, "Bubba" posted about information overload today. The shocking information though was that one of his solutions was to "stop using an RSS reader." Wow! Here is an excerpt...

More recently I've tried two ways dealing with info overload.  Ones I never thought I'd try. 

The first was un-subscribing from almost all e-newsletters, internal microsoft distribution lists, and setting up very strict email rules that filter away other sources of bulk mail.   I went from a lot of mail, to very little mail.  This was cool because I found myself walking around my office more, having more face to face conversations and just generally connecting with people at a deeper level.  On the flip side, I was the last to know about things like the new google calendar launch.  But, I still found out about it relatively quickly - the day it launched.  The interesting thing was that I my "virtual" relationships actually got better because I had (made?) the time to really engage people that weren't geographically co-located with me. 

The other method was to stop using an rss reader.  I know this is like blasphemy here on Scoble's blog and I'm kind of scared to admit it.  My logic was that I my brain would only remember a handful of sites and thus regulate how much time I spent absorbing information.  The weird thing is that it actually works pretty much like un-subscribing from bulk email sources.  The really important stuff found its way to me anyway (like bootcamp) and I spent more time out in the world. 

"Scared to admit it!" Bubba says! This reminds me of my mother! She still won't use ATM machines and consistent with that bizarre fact she refuses to get a computer or even use free email. No digital camera either. She doesn't like technology (her words) - however the cordless phone and fax machine did make the cut. That said, she has also cut down on information overload because she gets no e-mail. None. She has never gotten one e-mail message! She has an hour or day that most of us don't have as we sort through email, and now, RSS subscriptions. But sheesh, she's a 70 year old artist, so I can get it if she doesn't want the noise. Bubba needs to learn to adapt besides dumping his RSS reader

People in business will find RSS inescapable to effectively do their job in the future. And accordingly, they will require tools for efficiently handling "information overload" that is the unfortunate byproduct of this innovation we now call RSS. It's just like email all over again with numerous positives and negatives but at least this time there's no spam.

Tags: Scoble, Information Overload, Attensa

Commonsense Tagging Tools for the Enterprise

 

Jon Udell zeros in on how social bookmarks and tagging are commonsense tools for building effective knowledge systems that can benefit the individual and the workgroup.

 

"Shared bookmarking, coupled with tagging, is another piece of low-hanging fruit. Sprinkling Web 2.0 pixie dust won’t solve every problem, but the benefits of public services such as del.icio.us and Furl can be realized within the enterprise, too. That’s true because they benefit the individual first, and then, as a useful side effect, the community.

Given the opportunity, people will want to bookmark and tag the resources they publish internally. It’s the easiest way to create, manage, and share dynamic lists of such resources. This system pays for itself in improved personal productivity alone. Everything else is gravy, and there’s plenty of that.

Saved bookmarks chart the current and historical levels of interest in what their URLs represent, and they identify groups that share those interests. (Note that behind the firewall, bookmarks can refer to public resources as well as private ones inside the enterprise.) Tags identify sets of related resources and groups related to those sets. They also extend the metadata vocabularies that can be used to improve search. What’s not to like?"

We'd like to think that the Attensa tagging toolbars for Outlook, IE and Firefox are an easy way to get started enriching the value of your information.

Attensa, Attention, AttentionTrust and Sausage Making

Peter Caputa asks if Attensa is AttentionTrust compliant and whether information on what he has read can be exported in a standard file format.

The questions are straightforward and so is our answer to Peter's first question. Attensa supports the basic AttentionTrust principles.   

The answer to Peter's second question is more complex because the Attensa technical team and other industry players are working to create standards that address the mobility issues surrounding attention. We are collaborating with other Attention technology pioneers and working on the attention.xml standard to bring technologies to market that will deliver on the promise of Attention. 

I thought it would be useful to take a look at what we can do today to meet the spirit of the AttentionTrust principles.

1. You own your attention and can store it where ever you wish.
2. You can securely move your attention wherever you want  whenever you want to.

The first two principles are tightly connected. Today Attensa gives you control over your OPML file, a fundamental expression of your attention that you can own and store. You own your OPML file and you can create custom OPML files that can include a subset of the feeds that focus your attention. With the export feature you can store your complete file or any subset anywhere you want and share it with anyone you want.

You own your tags, another pure expression of your attention. Attensa tags are stored locally on your machine.  They are also stored and synchronized at del.icio.us if you use the service. And with the Attensa tagging toolbar for IE and the tagging extension for Firefox you can access your tags and tagged articles in your browser of choice.

3. You can securely move your attention wherever you want  whenever you want to.

To address this issue it is essential to define the components that make up your attention. Your OPML file and tags are part of it. Your click-stream can be considered a manifestation of your attention. What about all of the other ways you consume information? Attention is a huge concept that goes far beyond RSS feeds and click-streams. AttentionStream technology can be used to identify your favorite feeds and the feeds and articles you ignore or delete instantly. It can be used measure the time you spend reading specific articles. It can identify the articles you tag or forward to co-workers and friends.

Different companies will have their own take on the components that comprise Attention. Much of the attention being paid to attention is focused on its value in advertising and marketing. Attensa is taking a user-centric approach designed to improve the experience of staying up to date by addressing how AttentionStreams can cut through information overload and make knowledge workers more productive. These are two very different problems and will require very different solutions.

3. You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value  in return.

Of course you can pay attention to whomever you wish. (unless your IT department is controlling who gets access to specific feeds). The value you receive in return can take many forms, the pleasure of discovery, time savings from automagic prioritization, or a killer ad that arrives at the moment attention slips into intention.

4. You can see exactly how your attention is being used.

You might not want to see exactly how your attention is being used. Who has the time and inclination? Applied attention technology might be like sausage, you can enjoy the end product without watching how it's made. Business models will be based on the unique intellectual property companies will use to put attention to work. The hundreds of millions of people who use Google everyday don't have any idea how it works and I bet they don't really care. It just works. Those people who do care are putting pressure on Google to be more transparent on what they are doing with all the data they are collecting.

When attention is delivering prioritized, highly relevant information, elminating duplicates and delivering ads with 100% CTR, while protecting your privacy with opt-in processes and full disclosure, we'll know attention is being used to make life a little better.

Peter, if you have ideas on how to make your attention data mobile and more transparent share them with us. We're listening.

 

 

 

 

De-geeking Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of anything that captures your attention on the Web and to share those things with people with similar interests. Del.icio.us tags are simply keywords you add to add context to RSS feeds, articles, Web pages, blog posts, photos, even music you discover online. When you set up your bookmark page on Del.icio.us, not only can you see the pages you’ve you tagged, you can also see related articles from other people who tagged the same pages or used the same tags as you have. Since every Del.icio.us page has an RSS feed you can also subscribe feeds based on a given subject, user, URL, or tag.

You can use tags to organize information you find interesting, but the real magic of Del.icio.us is in its social network. Simply put, Del.icio.us is a powerful tool for sharing your attention. I am frequently surprised with the great material I find by exploring the articles that have captured the attention of other del.icio.us users.

When you find a Del.icio.us user who seems to have a gift for finding great material you can subscribe to a feed and every new article tagged by that user is sent right to folder in Attensa. In searching on attention, attention.xml and AttentionTrust.org I ran across Steve Gilmorr’s bookmarks. Now I’m automatically receiving any post regarding the subject of attention that Steve thinks is worth tagging. It’s better than searching. There is something inherently better about the articles Del.icio.us suggests. It’s a pure crystal attention stream.

OK. I’ll admit it. When I first went to check out Del.icio.us I got a wicked case of MEGO (my eyes glaze over). I couldn’t figure out what was going on until Eric Hayes walked me through it. I don’t think I’m alone in saying Del.icio.us is cryptic. But, once you get the hang of it, Del.icio.us opens up new doors.

We are using Attensa to de-geek the process of adding Del.icio.us tags. You can add tags to articles using a pull down list in Attensa for Outlook and by using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. When you tag articles with Attensa your bookmark list on Del.icio.us is updated and synchronized automatically.