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Aug
24
(Update at the bottom of the post)
The analogue TV signal in Australia will be switched off by 2013. This means that everyone without a digital tuner will suddenly find themselves free of broadcast television. The date for the switch over has been shifted several times as politicians remained convinced that the digital TV (DTV) adoption rates were so low that it would be a disaster if the signal was turned off as scheduled. I remember when the switch over was going to be sometime in 2005, then 2008, and now it will begin by 2011 and be completed by 2013.
I’ve always been confused about what the fuss is with adoption rates. People won’t rush out and upgrade their TV or buy a tuner until they have to. Just pick a date far in advance, prominently and consistently publicise the date and when the switch date looms, people will upgrade. Tuners are easy to come by, whether they be in a set-top box, built-in tuner in the TV, via pay TV like Foxtel or even a USB tuner for a computer. They’re also quite cheap. A standard definition set-top box can be bought for well under $50 at any large consumer electronics chain and high definition ones (the signal of choice for the Australian market) have started to drop well under $100 for the more dodgy, 90 day warranty, indeterminate country of origin brands.
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Aug
5
Do I really want my attention managed?
Filed Under PointOfView | 2 Comments
With information overload comes a desire to manage time and increasingly managing attention as well.
Untethered technology gives us the freedom to do nearly anything, anytime, anywhere. It can also enslave us - we feel compelled to use it where ever it is. Technology is neutral. How, when and where we use it is up to us
- Linda Stone, “Is it time to retire the never ending list?” (Huffington Post)
What is attention management?
There are two different concepts that are often referred to as “attention management” - one I’m not going to write about (mainly because I’m still researching what it means and its implications for my daily existence) and one I am going to write about.
What I am not referring to (just to get it out of the way) is the excellent work being done behind and around the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) standard, which provides a way to collect and rank the types of things you look at and store it in a portable XML format. However, the application of APML could form a part of the bigger picture down the track.
What does interest me is attention management within the context of what Linda Stone refers to as continuous partial attention (CPA) - paying partial attention to everything around you continuously. CPA is scanning everything constantly (possibly due to a fear of missing something). This should not be confused with good old fashioned multi-tasking, which is often a case of combining a few simple tasks (eg talking on the phone while sorting some papers).
CPA can obviously be a good thing if you are trying to quickly absorb a lot of information on a broad topic. However, anecdotally it appears to lead to stress and fatigue if adopted as a broader lifestyle choice. There are almost limitless sources of information, media and nodes of interaction. It is easy to switch to an always on, 24/7 lifestyle where the current morsel of datum is snacked upon before being quickly discarded for the next morsel, with 5 more morsels queuing up for every morsel that is skimmed and disposed of. Each morsel has its own way of alerting you to its existence and stealing away your attention, whether it be a “bing”, an on-screen pop up, a little envelope in the status tray or an ever rising number of unread items every time you look its was.
This is where attention management gets interesting.
How is my attention “managed”?
I am sure there are as many different ways to manage attention as there are attentions begging to be managed. APML-aware applications like Particls (currently a closed beta so I haven’t actually had a chance to use it) and Engagd from Australia’s Faraday Media are one way. From what I can see, these services use the data in your information profile to algorithmically filter incoming information so that only the stuff you are most interested in reaches you (please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).
It could be argued that the entire lifehacking movement is another way attacking the problem. While lifehacking ostensibly seems to be about being more efficient and managing time more effectively, a lot of the techniques shared between and adopted by knowledge workers are as much about managing interruptions as they are about being more efficient with the time available. A brief perusal of leading lifehack sites Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Stepcase Lifehack and even Ask Metafilter shows that this is a shared experience, often built upon the systems popularised by David Allen and his Getting Things Done philosophy (usually shortened to GTD).
What’s in it for me?
The theory of attention management is attractive. Successfully applied, my life should be more tightly controlled with better targeted information, less time spent on irrelevant tasks as I work more focused with less distractions, closing mental loop after mental loop, leaving me with a mind like water. Herein lies my difficulty. I like being somewhat distracted. I enjoy my slightly chaotic existence. I revel (and sometimes ROFL) in the serendipity of some of my daily distractions.
In the end, when I need to manage my attention and focus on something important, I use the easiest method of all.
Just turn it all off, people. The world will still be there when you get back.
Original photo credit - markhillary
Further reading
Attention Profiles
APML - The open standard for attention metadata - APML.org
Explaining APML: What it is and why you want it - Elias Bizannes (liako.biz)
Attention Profiling: APML Beginner’s Guide - Robin Good (MasterNewMedia)
Paying attention - personal blog of Chris Saad, co-founder of Faraday Media, DataPortability Project and the APML Workgroup
Continuous Partial Attention
continuouspartialattention - Linda Stone
Is it time to retire the never ending list? - Linda Stone (Huffington Post)
Dealing with partial attention issues - Marc Orchant (Platform Agnostic)
“Zerstreutheit” and the Attention Management Cure - Merlin Mann (43 Folders)
Continuous partial attention: software and solutions - Alex Iskold (ReadWriteWeb)
Nokia and continuous partial attention - Jack Schulze and Matt Webb (Schulze & Webb)
Lifehacking (historical)
Meet the Lifehackers - Clive Thompson (New York Times) 2005 (printer friendly, all on one page version)
Jul
26
On information overload
Filed Under PointOfView | 3 Comments
Over the last few months I have witnessed a steadily growing stream of writers declaring news feed, blogging and/or social media bankruptcy, citing such things as information overload, hobbies becoming ‘work’ or even the fact that so many people on the internet can be jerks about such small things. Maybe you’re like Sarah Perez who wrote “Taking a breather from social media? Maybe we’re doing it wrong?“ Perhaps you’re more like Robert Scoble, who wrote in “Has/how/why tech blogging has failed you” that the joy of geeking out on tech walked out at around the same time everyone got obsessed by the business side of things. Or, you might have sympathy for the views of Jason Calacanis who tired of the haters and ‘officially’ retired from blogging (Jason’s scheming something, I’m sure of it).
Who is suffering here?
The question to my mind is, just who is actually suffering here? Too much information sounds like your classic First World problem - a bunch of hyper-connected individuals who have found that ‘Life 2.0′ has left their brains crammed with more information than they can process, leaving them anxious, jaded, or worn out (or all of the above). I understand their pain and share some of it, too. I do not have too much sympathy however. So much of it seems to be a self-generated problem.
What is the real problem?
Where does the problem lie? Consuming large amounts of media is actually pretty easy. You can see a video from 2007 by 4 hour work week guru Tim Ferriss of Robert Scoble outlining how he reads 600+ news feeds every day as just one example of how to do it (although I don’t know if Scoble still consumes media in quite this way). The difficulty is in absorbing the information, filtering it and synthesising and sharing it. Normal people don’t have this problem. I’m sure that most people who consume massive amounts of data do it for fun and personal interest and don’t have the inner need to process it to a level that writers and other web professionals do.
The people experiencing the most difficulty are the amateurs writing, digging, twittering, friending, stumbling and otherwise staying connected for the fun of it. These are people who have a full time job and often families of their own where reading and processing information is done in their spare time, time that could be spent de-compressing, socialising, unwinding and experiencing. Be aware that I’m not passing judgement on how people choose to spend their spare time (I’m one of these people described above after all), but it explains to me why this malaise seems to have become the echo-meme du jour.
Strategies for dealing with the data flood
If there is one geeks aren’t short of, it’s solutions.
(jeff)isageek writes on LouisGray.com “Trimming the fat on RSS Feeds” that a combination of shared items (whether through Google Reader shared items or services like Readburner and RSSmeme), Friendfeed aggregation and Twitter is the way to go. This does run the risk of feeding into the echo chamber and, as Duncan Riley shared in the comments of that post, “if we all followed it, there would be no shared items to follow :)”. Other commenters noted that if you have interests outside of tech (apparently some people do, but I’m not convinced) than the narrow field of early adopters aren’t likely to sate these needs.
Matt Wood shared on 43 Folders back in November 2007 that it is all in how you group your information (in this case, also RSS feeds) and it is okay to not have read every single feed that comes into your reader.
And then there is Marshall Kirkpatrick, one time lead writer on TechCrunch and now lead writer at ReadWriteWeb (as well as being a market intelligence, product usability and promotions consultant). If you want a way to consume a lot of media, look no further than “How I use RSS to track thousands of news sources easily“.
The answer?
Obviously there is no one answer. Everyone needs to find their own solution. Duh, I guess.
If anyone has been wondering where I have been the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to find my own solution. I’m not there yet, but at least I know where I’m heading.
Photo credits: Information overload: layout debugging by corra24 and Thinking on the wall: last spots left by Alex Osterwalder
Jun
26
Since its debut in 2004, del.icio.us has been the market standard for social bookmarks. Its reputation was further enhanced in late 2005 when it was acquired by Yahoo!. Social bookmarking was going places. It wasn’t that long ago that every second blog (particularly in the tech niches) had some type of del.icio.us widget in a sidebar somewhere. Sometimes it was a simple list of the latest bookmarks the blog author had while other times it was a tag cloud of recently added items. Either way, del.icio.us seemed to be around every corner.
There have been many pretenders to the social bookmarking throne - Furl and Ma.gnolia are just two - but del.icio.us remained the place to go to see what other people felt was worth bookmarking. Even Google had a stab at it with the horribly named and feature free Google Shared Stuff. Nothing has been able to gain the traction that del.icio.us has managed.
However, with the digerati clamouring for the long-awaited release of Delicious 2.0, something of a vacuum has appeared in the social sharing space. Are Google Reader shared items filling this void?
Shared items have arrived at an interesting time and in something of a perfect storm. RSS is increasing in popularity and verges on mainstream acceptance. Lifestreaming services are popping up all over the place (see 35 ways to stream your life on ReadWriteWeb for example) and many of these services allow RSS feeds to be imported. Every Google Reader shared items page has an RSS feed. The recent addition of notes functionality allows individuals to add a note to items as they share them from within Google Reader. Add to this the Google Reader Notes bookmarklet that allows you to share any web page, and all bases seems to be covered.
I see more and more “link blogs” that are the blog author’s re-purposed shared items feed. Services like FriendFeed are full of other people’s shared items. Other services like Readburner absolutely depend on other people’s shared items feeds.
Yahoo! had better watch out. If Google Reader shared items aren’t the new del.icio.us yet, it’s only a matter of time before they are.
Will shared items replace del.icio.us for social bookmarking ? Let me know what you think in the comments.
Jun
11
I understand that content owners have licensing agreements around the world and feel that they can’t open up television programs globally to protect the financial investment of various regional licensees.
However, content owners, you need to understand that if you deny people a way to legally access your product simply on the basis of geographic location, they will get it anyway without you. Once people realise they can get the same content more easily and at a better quality than anything you provide, they may never return to you as a paying customer ever again.
There is a market out there absolutely begging to be serviced. Unclench the fist or it will squeeze out through your fingers and be gone forever.
Adobe Media Player
The Office Season 4 on The Pirate Bay
The Colbert Report on The Pirate Bay
Jun
3
Google spam?
Filed Under news | Leave a Comment
(click picture to embiggen)
Apparently, no one is safe from the Google spam filter.
Jun
1
Google and Jaiku
Filed Under housekeeping | Leave a Comment
I recently wrote another guest piece for Sarah Perez:
Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.
Click through to read the rest of Google dropped the ball on Jaiku at Sarah’s site, Sarah in Tampa.
May
24
Almost famous
Filed Under housekeeping | Leave a Comment
I had the pleasure of corresponding with Thord Daniel Hedengren this week and the end result is yours truly is this week’s featured blogger atThord’s excellent Blogger Talks.
Woo!
May
22
While using someone else’s media player to stream mp3s hosted on your site can be fun (see the tutorials on how to use the Google Reader player and how to use the Yahoo media player), nothing quite beats the thrill of rolling your own media player and controlling it on your own server. Below are some simple steps anyone can take to use the free jwplayer from Jeroen Wijering.
JW FLV Media Player
The JW FLV Media Player is the brainchild of Jeroen Wijering. It is made with Adobe Flash technology and will play not only flv files but any other media format supported by Flash, including our self-hosted mp3. You can get the jw flv media player up and running with a few simple steps:
- Download the source files for the media player from here
- Unzip the source files and upload them to your own hosted server. I created a new folder on my account called ‘mediaplayers’ and then created another folder called ‘jwplayer’. Take note of the location of the files as you will need this later.
- Go to the jw flv media player setup wizard
Configure the wizard as desired. I’ve included a screenshot of my wizard configuration and I’ve kept it very basic. The wizard lets you do things such as change colour, size, add playlists (if you have those set up already), add a stop button - stacks of features all up. When you’re finished configuring, click the ‘Update and preview code’ button to see what your player will look like and the code you need to cut and paste into your own site.As a quick explanation, the ’source’ option is where you have uploaded the media player files on your server and the file option is where you have stored your mp3. Also, the ideal height for the slim player is 20 pixels (the default setting) for a single mp3. Larger sizes are useful for when you have a playlist of tracks you want to display.- Copy and past the code into your webpage. As an example, the code generated from my options is:<embed src=”http://techwhimsy.com/mediaplayers/jwplayer/mediaplayer.swf” width=”440″ height=”20″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” flashvars=”height=20&width=440&file=
http://techwhimsy.com/31_Ghosts_IV.mp3″ />
Embedded, the final version looks like this: And just to prove how easy it is to change colours etc, here’s another version created with the wizard: If you are having problems with the embed code (for example, the code shows up as standard text in your blog), try removing all the line returns and replacing them with a single space instead. Also, for some reason that escapes me (but you clever bunch out there probably know), you need to have a space between the end of the code and the closing “/>”.
May
12
Yahoo Design Tools: Yahoo’s hidden gem
Filed Under how-to | 2 Comments
With all the fuss surrounding the will they/won’t they merger of Microsoft and Yahoo, it has been surprising to see just how many cool and interesting things there are buried inside the Yahoo corporation. There is much more to Yahoo than search, directories, Flickr and del.icio.us. A quick scan of Yahoo! Everything reveals a whole bunch of stuff from the new social news service Buzz to online video editing with Jumpcut to the Zimbra collaboration and instant messaging service. However, what is possibly the most interesting to web geeks is the unsung Yahoo User Interface (YUI) and Yahoo Design Pattern Library, both part of the Yahoo Developer Network.
The YUI is a collection of cross-browser controls and utilities written in Javascript that are intended to be used in developing rich internet applications (think AJAX and DHTML). It is freely available under the BSD licence for anyone to use in commercial applications or otherwise. Included in the YUI is a collection of Cascading Style Sheets including a comprehensive style sheet providing a large range of different grid design options for page layout. The YUI has too many cool things to list here, but some of the cooler applications include a rich text editor, calendars and drag and drop utilities. The YUI is quite a technical collection and is essentially a giant repository of server and client side code.
The Yahoo Design Pattern Library is a practical application of the industrial strength code in the YUI. The patterns are an attempt to offer comprehensive solutions to a wide-range of interface design problems and pull together different pieces of the YUI code. There are design patterns for navigation options (things like tabs and indexes), calendars, page layouts and slideshows. Like the YUI, the Design Pattern Library is free to use by all comers and is licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution licence.
To keep up to date on new additions to both YUI and the Design Pattern Library, keep your eyes on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog at http://yuiblog.com/blog/
Note: as far as I am aware, no part of techwhimsy.com uses either YUI or the pattern library. Now that I know they exist, there’s a very good chance some of the features will make their way into techwhimsy v2.0
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techwhimsy.com Link Blog- Speaking at GOVIS 2009: User-centred government - More than meets the eyeacidlabs Stephen Collins
- I deleted my Brightkite accountNathanael Boehm on web user experience design, the Internet, social networking & free wireless NathanaelB
- How to Be Awesome at FollowupStepcase Lifehack Torley
- Microsoft OneNote is a Note-Taking Power ToolLifehacker Australia (author unknown)
- 4 Questions for Every Early AdopterMashable! Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
- OrianaWarren Ellis Warren Ellis
- The History and Nature of Man FriendshipsThe Art of Manliness Brett & Kate McKay
- Is Google Making Our E-Learning Stupid?The Rapid eLearning Blog tom
- 3 Simple Techniques to Guide Your Learner’s AttentionThe Rapid eLearning Blog tom
- Counting your big pile of Benjamins: 5 startup tips for maximizing ad revenueFuturistic Play by @Andrew_Chen Andrew Chen
- Awesome Picture of the Day: Best. Mailbox. EVER.Pixel Bits pixelbits
- Social Networks: The Case for a "Pause" Button43 Folders (author unknown)
- Solve The Writing Blockage Mystery Like A Master DetectiveBroadcasting Brain markdykeman
- A Foolish Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Little Bloggers?Awake At The Wheel | Personal Growth | careers | entrepreneurship | health & happiness Jonathan Fields
- Combine Feed-Creating Tools with Email Alerts to Nab That JobLifehacker Australia (author unknown)
