Craig's Lemonade

RSS in Japan, Ad data from Pheedo

I just ran across a post from Pheedo's weblog. Apparently adoption of RSS is growing even faster in Japan than the US. Also on Pheedo's blog is some data they have pulled from their own network. Exciting stuff. More data confirming that well targeted ads "pulled" via RSS feeds vs. "pushed" via spam have much higher CTRs. Obvious i suppose but exciting nonetheless. Check out Pheedo's blog for more interesting data on the rapid growth and interest in RSS advertising.

At Attensa what is really exciting to us is how much more accepted and useful advertising will be for USERS once attention streams are leveraged to deliver newfound relevance in internet advertising. In the meantime, just simple Google AdSense and Pheedo insertions are an exciting development. I think Jupiter is wrong about the impact on e-mail, i think it will be considerable as consumers and marketers use RSS to build a one-to-one, secure communications channel....at the expense of e-mail.

AttentionTrust.org causes a stir

AttentionTrust.org was hatched and has caused some blog activity today. Dan Farber wrote "What's AttentionTrust.org all about?" and along the way points to an un-attentiontrust.org rant that is pretty funny. There is also a link to Seth Goldstein's blog, who came up with the idea of proposing AttentionTrust.org in the first place.

Our company will likely support this effort as it gains momentum and its objectives become clearer. Right now it’s not terribly clear to me. We have bet our company (Attensa) on attention data - or attention streams as we call them - and through proprietary infrastructure we will utilize these streams to enable altogether new capabilities that deliver value to users and businesses.

How many people will really understand and want to "own" and manage "raw" attention.xml-class metadata anyway? I suspect people want to remain anonymous, their data private, and not have to think about it and just sit back and enjoy the benefits. If they don’t value the benefits, like cookies for example, perhaps they'll just turn off (or don’t use) the application or web site that is generating attention data.

For those of us in this emerging business surrounding RSS, educating users/businesses/marketers of the potential benefits of attention data is the first mission. I suppose the good news is that more folks are learning about attention data and attention.xml.

New Forrester report on RSS released

Charlene Li of Forrester has released two reports on RSS that summarizes the state of RSS and how early we still are in the growth of the sector – some 2% of US households utilizing RSS – and a second report details best practices by Marketers. Marketers that are on the ball are already looking at RSS (some 50% of those surveyed back in February) as a more efficient and less annoying way to communicate with customers than e-mail. This wont be the only reason to make the move to RSS but an obvious one to get started with RSS.

The number of users of RSS in North America is not surprising (2 – 5% depending on the segment) but that is “consumers.” The numbers are considerably higher in business and changing the way companies communicate internally, throughout the supply chain, and with customers. Our data is only anecdotal, but in most of the companies we talk to the percentage of users using RSS is already north of 50% - and growing fast. And other than companies such as NewsGator, Attensa and a few others the commercial grade applications/servers available (or soon available) are few and far between.

I am speaking on a panel next month at a Software Association of Oregon event on this subject – Blogging and RSS. It is a Marketing SIG event and an active area of interest of software companies of all shapes and sizes. There are lots of unknowns but one thing is already clear - smart marketers are digging into RSS now.

The need for "www.attention.org"

The organization doesn’t exist yet but here at Attensa we have concluded after several brainstorming sessions, discussions with partners, presentations to investors, and demonstrations of our technology ‑ that strategically we need an “attention.org” to exist. While Eric Hayes (a founder and VP R&D) has joined Technorati’s brain trust in helping to define attention.xml, this is only a small part of the equation. As an industry we need consumers and businesses to “get it.” Steve Gillmor can write until he is blue in the face but it wont make a difference if he is the only one on the soap box! I beleive we need an industry commitment not only to the technology but to the evangelism and education of all constituents.

Consumers, partners, media and more need to feel comfortable about the anonymous and privacy protected nature of attention data (as it is presently being contemplated) – and how it can enrich their lives! Attensa believes RSS, as beautiful a thing as it is, will ultimately enable – no force – users to drink from the proverbial firehose. Longhorn's integration of RSS will essentially guarantee it! Segue Attensa...Less is more is our corporate battle cry and we are utilizing attention data to intelligently improve relevance of information for all users. In fact, in the future, we intend to license our engine that facilitates this to third party aggregators.

While here at Attensa we are working with massive amounts of transient meta data or “attention streams” - we are committed to maintaining compatibility with the attention.xml spec once it is fully baked. Please contact me or Attensa bizdev if you or your company is interested in helping us champion this technology.

P.S. Somebody apparently wants $4K for the domain so we’ll have to come up with an alternative name too

Blog right from Outlook to TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal

Attensa for Outlook .97 was posted today and while there are performance and other fixes the coolest part of the release is the ability to directly create and send blog posts to TypePad, Blogger, and LiveJournal. You can also “re-publish” your blogs too! This is not your ordinary "publish" from Outlook, so check it out - you can even insert WYSIWYG MSFT word created tables! Check out the configuration options too.

wow! interesting keyboard news?!

NOT your typical user interface kudos, but, i'll just say "cool."

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000740050460/

i'm not even sure how this works..but it would be so useful if these keys could be programmed to change and display context sensitive controls based on application, application state, or even collabortive options delivered by others! Anyway you slice it, IMHO, cool. Of course, i am not a touch typist. ; )

Structured Blogs and Attention Data...they need each other

PubSub is leading the cause for structured blogs and has some nice simple examples for book and music reviews replete with links to buy on Amazon. At Attensa we have been looking closely at structured data types, beyond even those of blog origin, and hope that standards such of these catch on (at a minimum) with mainstream consumers. Obviously internet retailers will also benefit if such structured blogging is accepted…and at Attensa we believe the results can be dramatically improved for all participants.

Enter “attention streams”

Structured blogs in our view might be just half the equation, as it will be sophisticated (and anonymous) utilization of attention data that will make examples such as these truly useful to consumers AND the businesses that will ultimately benefit. Charlene Li’s blog has several other consumer level ideas that are particularly conducive to the structured blog approach. John Batelle goes even further discussing the implications on search and tagging.

All of these ideas though are predominantly consumer-centric. While interesting and useful, we feel the real opportunity is most certainly in the enterprise including CRM and throughout the supply chain. Imagine structured blogs from everything from RFPs to Expense Management to Annual Reviews to Applications for Employment. Consumers and retailers will no doubt benefit from structured blogs but it will be miniscule compared to the potential in the enterprise. That’s my (Attensa’s) take anyway.

Always a great time to be an entrepreneur

It has been more than a few weeks but I was just made aware of a couple of blog postings by some serial entrepreneurs about how inexpensive it is to start a web services company these days. Joe Kraus’s blog (a founder of Excite) and Mark Fletcher’s blog (founder Bloglines/ONElist) have both chimed in on this very true fact. However, you cant do it for free. It depends on the complexity of the engineering, but starting a web services company is a lot cheaper if nothing else one just looks at the cost of servers, bandwidth, and development tools. Labor is getting A LOT cheaper too but that is a whole other discussion.

While I cut my teeth in the venture backed conventional software publishing world, the past several years I have been involved in a sophisticated infrastructure development project AND the conventional software business as a leader, partner, advisor and investor. The challenge with web services for the entrepreneur (experienced or otherwise) is that the more technically complex projects STILL can require significant capital and a year or more of engineering effort. Moreover, if the business is in a technology or market spacethat is really early in its evolution (left of the chasm) then attracting significant dollars quickly becomes a catch-22. So, if possible, the founding team needs to redefine their solution into smaller chunks so it can be rolled out and “proven” to prospective investors and early adopters on a shoestring budget.

It is certainly not the early days of the internet when Sun, Oracle, and the ISP got half of the VCs investment…but even today, with newfound VC activity (especially in the blogosphere) Series A investors more often than not want the product “done” before it can attract investment. So, if you need more than friends and family investment to make your dream fly - get to a demonstrable milestone and find a VC who is already drinking the same Kool-Aid as you, and do it "right."

Whether before, during, or after the bubble...i think it has ALWAYS been a great time to be an entrpreneur. Yeah, it cots less now, but there will be entrepreneurs saying the same thing 10 years from now..just wait until the Indian, Chinese, and others have a truly level playing field. This is going to be fun, i expect to be working on my tenth company or so by then laughing at how expensive and slow things were back in 2005!

"pay" attention bloggers

A very interesting storm is brewing stemming from Tom Foremski’s Silicon Valley Watcher article on Technorati. Doc Searls jumped in on his weblog and a debate has ensued. There are several interesting points of view on his blog and of course links to folks with some very interesting perspectives on the ethics or at least the appropriateness of creating and/or mining the data of blogger activity. One thing all sides agree on for sure is that nobody likes it when a "pitch" happens on a panel that is supposed to be educational. I dont see what the big deal is personally, but, I'm IN the software business so go figure.

At Attensa, blogger activity is only a part of the “attention data” mix for us as our planned solutions more broadly target RSS – and not just the RSS of bloggers. The enterprise is discovering RSS in a big way and on the heels of Microsoft’s announcements in the space, IT departments are looking more closely than ever at RSS as an enabling communications and collaboration technology everywhere (employees, partners, and customers.) We’ve so far only announced our reader, server strategy, and a few associated and obvious extensions – but the real value for users in the long run will be through the intelligent dissection and application of attention data, or as we say at Attensa - attention streams. "Pay" attention, it's going to get interesting.

(Anonymous) Attention Data

It looks like we have a lot of missionary work on our hands communicating the importance of attention data. While Steve Gillmor has been championing attention.xml for well over a year now, and our own co-founder Eric Hayes has joined the Technorati guys as an author of the spec – most folks (even the blogworld digerati) have no clue as to how useful and important attention data will become. Even Microsoft was dissing it at Gnomedex. Some think there might be privacy concerns, and there probably will be, as we have been talking about this a lot lately at Attensa.

Whether attention data, attention.xml, or “attention streams” as we call them here at Attensa, I think we may need to insert “anonymous” more aggressively into the positioning. The attention.xml wiki Q&A covers this but perhaps it should be moved up into the actual overall positioning/messaging for attention.xml. “Anonymous Attention Data” may sound redundant to those in the know, but it will likely be important to help communicate to the inevitable voices of privacy concern. The truth is that plain simple cookies are ultimately probably more "invasive" (and less useful) to unsuspecting users than well executed use of attention streams will be…at least by what you will see coming from Attensa anyway!

Lastly, the "All Things RSS" blog by Scott Sharp introducing some interesting opportunities a la VersiSign's business model that could be enabled nicely with attention data. The post "Beyond Attention.XML: A Contract to Ensure Privacy" begins an interesting discussion surrounding privacy concerns and business opportunity...