Kathy Sierra, soft-spoken in person, kick-ass writer, on her time at Search Champs:

“Usability schmusability… where’s the part where we talk about how this helps the user kick-ass?”

Kathy’s doing great work: Here’s her feed.

Boy, this one is right up my current alley (see yesterday):

Richard MacManus interviews Digg founder Kevin Rose:

“The problem with rating individual users is that it really doesn’t scale well. We have 160,000 registered users and it would be impossible for everyone to go through and directly rate everyone else. What we have created, which is quickly becoming a popular way to discover new stories, is our friends system. This enables you to create a group of trusted users who read each others articles and trust each others content.”

Ed Batista on Wikipedia:

“Of course we sacrifice accuracy at the micro level–with no editorial apparatus constraining the system, anything you read at any given moment could be total bullshit. But in a free, open and fluid intellectual market, bad ideas will eventually be driven out by better ones–and sooner rather than later.”

The modern-day Gutenberg responds to the 455! comments left after it was discovered he had a blog:

“I just played my part. I built on the work of others — the Internet, invented 20 years before the web, by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and colleagues, for example, and hypertext, a word coined by Ted Nelson for an idea of links which was already implemented in many non-networked systems. I just put these technologies together. And then, it all took off because of this amazing community of enthusiasts, who have done such incredible things with the technology, and are still advancing it in so many ways.”

He’s also building the Semantic Web himself.

And he thinks you should have your own URI!!!

By the way: here’s Tim’s feed.

Brady Forrest, organizer of Microsoft Search Champs, the event I just returned from where Microsoft asked a bunch of bloggers/technologists (including quite a few Mac users like me) what we thought of future MS products:

“We don’t want to waste our time getting pats on the back.”

Alex Barnett:

“The idea that only geeks – and not the ‘average’ people – want to have a more effecient way of finding content that matches their interests seems way off to me.”

I had a great conversation with Merlin Mann, Thomas Vander Wal, and Fred Oliviera today about our collective lack of attention. Most of us had relatively sophisticated ways of dealing with it, from outright getting on the wagon and shutting off the feed firehose completely to tweaking our software to only allow access at certain times. Interestingly, one of the things that we all did was to set our email readers to only fetch mail about once per hour.

Most discussions I’ve had lately are about this lack of attention. It’s getting to the point where people are going on “content diets” to lose the drinking-from-a-firehose feeling, just like they go on food diets to lose weight.

My problem is not email, not spam, not chat. It’s reading feeds. I’m simply overwhelmed. I’ve gotten to the point where I skim for only those things that meet the following criteria:

• Big, new idea
• An idea that immediately builds on one I’m already comfortable with

If an idea doesn’t meet these criteria, then I filter it out. I simply can’t read those longer, thoughtful posts by people I’m not familiar with. And even those people who I know and are familiar with get filtered out if I can’t see value in the headline or first sentence. The downside to this is that I have less time for thoughtful repose, and less time to really consider some of the more subtle points someone is making. I went on vacation recently and I read two whole books (books are a paper medium on which words are printed in pages and bound by cloth covered cardboard), and loved every minute of it.

So I’m interested in hearing about your attention problems? Got any good or interesting tips for dealing with it?

Matt McAlister:

“In Old Media, you have a whole team of people thinking about things like the table of contents all day long. If those same people spent all that time thinking about how to engage with the audience online instead, I’m certain you’d see a more dynamic response to your brand in short order.”

Noah Brier:

“On a personal level attention data seems to have the most potential as a way to power some kind of recommendation engine. If you could plug in all my RSS feeds, attention data, del.icio.us bookmarks, etc. into some kind of system and then compare it all to the same data from friends, I could probably get some good recommendations.”

Doug Marttila:

“What you really want on the web is a taxonomy that you understand.”