The Looming Attention Crisis

This is an amazing set of thoughts. I share Fred's concern about attention deficit... my head is racked everyday attempting to keep up with 187 feeds I'm tracking. I find myself reading feeds whenever I have as little as 2 minutes on the schedule and this jamming up is resulting in my having a lowered degree of comprehension about what I'm actually reading.

Lately I have been cleaning up my blogroll in an attempt to weed out the feeds that are not updated at all or very infrequently. Somebody please please please come out with a bookmark/feed organizing model based on update frequency and/or the frequency by which I read the feeds. In other words, move the stuff I'm most likely to want to read up to the top of the list.

The other thing that is interesting to consider is that we have crossed a threshold by which all the interesting stuff that there is to cover is getting written about on a daily basis and the great bulk of blog postings are now linking to other blog postings (insert guilty plea here). True? I don't know but I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and I am struck by the somewhat anecdotal observation that this may be happening. Perhaps this points to the greater knowledge problem of jumping to other topical launch pads that are outside of normal observational purvue based on relevancy. Plattner talks about this as a driving motivation behind the d.school initiative that he funded, that when you bring together students from the medical, philosophy, archeological, anthropology, and whatever other disciplines to solve computer science problems you get a vastly better solution that if the CS school alone works the problem. How do we do that with blogs? How do I find nonlinear data sets that may be relevant to something I'm interested in without relying on the ingenuity of my own keyword searches?

On another note, if you get the opportunity to sit down with Umair Haque and just talk, do it because he's one of the smartest and most articulate people I've had the pleasure to meet.

Link: A VC: The Looming Attention Crisis.

So attention is a zero sum game and if we are creating (at an exponential rate?) more uses of attention, then we are facing a looming attention crisis.

Comments

[Jeff Clavier]

Have you tried Memeorandum to quickly grasp the "hot news" of the moment ? I use it now through the day when I don't have time to browse through my 250 feeds.

[Stacey Douglas]

Fred's post is a good read. I just read and blogged it myself. I use Bloglines for my RSS reader. It has a setting called "Show only updated feeds" which makes life insanely easier. If a blog doesn't have anything to say right now, I simply don't see it. When I read a post, it immediately goes away and out of my field of attention. I'd love something even smarter, say, for example, that kept up with how often I check a given feed, but it's still a big help.

[jeff]

Hey Jeff,
Yeah, I've been using Memeorandum increasingly lately, it's a daily must read.

Digg a lot as well, but it's not as meaty as memeorandum.

[Greg Linden]

How do you find nonlinear data sets that may be relevant to something you're interested in?

I think you use Findory, Jeff. That's exactly what Findory is designed to do.

Findory learns from the articles you read, quietly shares what others in the community have found, and helps you discover other interesting articles.

[Kingsley Kerce]

The Bloglines reader is also capable of sorting the feeds list "By Number [of articles] Unread".

[ben casnocha]

Brad Burnham notes:

"A very coarse way to segregate feeds is as publishers or distributors. Publishers tend to publish relatively few posts that are longer than average and filled with original content. Distributors (also called linkers) tend to generate many posts a day and typically republish short excepts of other people's post with a short commentary of their own. Each has their place on the web, but you will find over time that as you feed list grows, the distributors will provide less value to you because you will already be directly subscribing to many of the same feeds that they tend to republish. Selectively eliminating just a few distributors/linkers can dramatically lower the number of posts you have to read each day. "

This gets at our earlier email exchange.....

[Liam]

For nonlinear data sets that may be relevant, Findory is the answer. For feeds that you are already subscribed to, SearchFox does a really good job of surfacing new content from the feeds that matter most to you.

[vinnie mirchandani]

taking about time an attention - would you rather trade for a corporate job with endless meetings, emails and voice mails....read link below

http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2005/11/attention_when_.html#

[Michael Vizard]

We're working on it at www.attentiontech.com