Attention will solve Information Overload

First of all, thanks Rok for the mention of attention as a way to solve information overload. Rok also points to a blog post on SyndicateBlog on the subject of "unusable feeds."

Well, at Attensa we indeed believe attention is the holy grail to solving the emerging (but heretofore irrelevant) problem of information overload. In my opinion, the overload problem will be obvious to the masses once Outlook 12 (and IE7) introduce RSS capabilities to the rank and file "knowledge worker."

Gates addressed the "information overload" problem apparently at his CEO summit last year - see this article. Outlook 12, from what I can tell, will help cause information overload, not help mitigate it. But, that's where Attensa comes in. Intelligent utilization of Attention data is paramount. Counting links or assigning static weights to articles will not cut it. By the way, attention is not just tracking browser clicks either. While we are championing attention categorically we are already starting to worry about the bastardization of the term. Attention - done right - cannot be bolted on as technology. At least not well anyway. Attention is the core technical ideology here and is the foundation of our infrastructure.

We will soon release our Attensa 1.0 for Outlook. While the obvious and most talked about application of our AttentionStream technology is the forthcoming article level prioritization and recommendation (as opposed to subscription recommendations) it is only synchronization that will first utilize this infrastructure. Recommendation will follow soonafter. (As will our Enterprise Server.)

To be clear, we are supportive of the attention.xml initiative (Attensa co-founder Eric Hayes is a co-author and he and Tantek of Technorati pushed the work over to microformats.org) but we recognize that it only scratches the surface as to what is possible with sophisticated attention stream analysis. Attention can help users cut through information overload and "attention" is not just web browser clickstreams to better target ads.