Most companies glom onto personal content like it’s 70% chocolate: they won’t even consider sharing it unless they get paid a lot of money. However, what they should do is start treating content like a Toblerone, sharing it all around. Some companies sell names and emails as mailing lists, but most don’t. Most companies hoard […]

Continue Reading: Open for Business: The Importance of Sharing Content

Lots of chatter around the term “Web 2.0” lately. Richard has a good summary here: Tone Down the Cheerleading. I wrote a quick bit last week: Web 2.0 as the Era of Interfaces. There are many others: The Politics of Web 2.0, Not 2.0? are just two. Thankfully, the issue is not that there is […]

Continue Reading: The Web 2.o Naming Backlash

In The Dark Side of Technorati Tags, Om Malik reports that Technorati tags are being gamed too much for his liking. Most importantly, Om brings up the point that should be brought up: who’s getting what benefit? For those new to tagging, Technorati tags are simply words that writers include in their posts that point […]

Continue Reading: Technorati and Del.icio.us Tagging: A Quick Comparison Study

You know you have trouble when people start calling something a “buzzword” and a lot of folks have been calling “Web 2.0” a buzzword lately. I don’t think it is one, or rather I think that what it refers to is a real thing. If we end up calling it something else, that’s fine, but […]

Continue Reading: Web 2.0 as the Era of Interfaces

Here’s a scenario sure to be familiar to most of you:

You’re in your feed reader, and you’re scanning your feeds to see what’s new and interesting. You find posts of all kinds, some about current news, some about technology, some about whatever is happening in the Michael Jackson ordeal. Your problem is becoming more apparent (and worse) every day: which posts do I read? Which ones get my finite attention?

What’s Happening to Our Attention:

1. There are many things competing for your attention
2. Your attention is finite (you only have so much of it)
3. Your attention can only be directed at one thing at a time
4. There are increasing numbers of people writing content that is relevant to you

Possible Solutions About Where to Pay Attention:

1. Spend more time attending to your feeds, taking away time spent on other parts of your life
2. Spend less time on each thing that wants your attention, lessening your comprehension or reflection of that thing
3. Become more picky about what you attend to, letting more and more semi-relevant content fall by the wayside but keeping your comprehension and reflection level about the same

Notice that each solution has drawbacks because of the finiteness of our attention. In other words, if you click on a post to go read it on a site, you’ve just decided in some small way that you’re not going to attend to other things as much as you could have.

What, Ultimately, Catches Our Attention?

1. Catchy phrase in the title?
2. Authority of the speaker?
3. Quality of content?
4. Whether you’ve heard about it elsewhere?
5. Amount of time you have?
6. etc…

Design accordingly…

Start/Join the Discussion | Bokardo Interface

In Web 2.0, your interface is your product. It is not something bolted on, added later, or done as an afterthought. Increasingly, it is a key differentiator that people will use to evaluate and decide whether or not to continue coming back for what you have to offer. It is the frontier of design innovation. […]

Continue Reading: Your Interface is Your Product

For the most part, designers can’t control experiences because experiences are subject to the user. Just as we can’t know the mind of another, we can’t truly know what they’re experiencing. We can, however, create tools with which users can have experiences. Sure, these tools (otherwise known as interfaces) can help tremendously, but more and more we’re seeing that users will use them or bypass them in ways that we cannot control. So don’t be surprised or dismayed at your lack of control. With Web 2.0 (the web as platform), we’re giving permission for all this to happen. And it’s happening at the speed of the API.

Continue Reading: Give up Control or You’ll Lose it Forever: Experience Designers Beware – Web 2.0 Interfaces Change Everything

Don’t forget to roll your own API, so that others can build competing interfaces…

Well, not interfaces that compete necessarily, but interfaces that use the data in your database to combine with other services to produce other amazing things.

Sharing information is good. Locking it up is bad.

O’Reilly Radar: A great site for folks who are interested in seeing how a company full of thought leaders is leveraging blogs, or if you’re simply a techie.

If you’re not familiar with the O’Reilly line of books, or the O’Reilly Conferences, check them out. This company, run by the Good O’Reilly™ (Tim), does as much for teaching folks technology than anybody else. I especially like Tim’s philosophy about what he calls Alpha Geeks, first adopters who show by their current actions what trends will be hitting the rest of us in a year or two.

Steve Gillmor, creator of Attention.xml and one of the leading thinkers on Attention in general, gives us this post on many things, including the importance of APIs as well as the following quote: “Attention is not automation; it’s the aggregation of gestures that model our instincts, hopes, and ethics.”.

This could be the most important quote about attention that I’ve seen yet, and I think that the automation/aggregation distinction is one we’ll be dealing with a whole lot more in Web 2.0.

When thinking about the scary topic of automating human behavior, think about what we do when we do contextual inquiry, going out into the world and getting into the context of someone else. We sit down, observe them, discover their needs, and use that to inform design. On the Web, we’re aggregating data to do the same thing…and sometimes, just sometimes, it works. Don’t be afraid of it. Just be careful.