Craig's Lemonade

TechCrunch – Get your daily dose

I am a long time fan of the top technology blog called TechCrunch, and like any curious, aware, and informed technology CEO I read it daily. It’s a must. Actually, I read it more than daily as I have an icon on my iPhone that take me directly to it so if I’m stuck in line at Whole Foods, I generally will take a peek at the recent stories before I look even at my RSS feeds. I am a startup junkie, no doubt about it. Despite the economic doldrums that hammer us all day in the news – many would be surprised to learn that there is a lot of exciting new stuff coming at us like a fire hose and it is not all doom and gloom.

I still regularly ask folks around town (Portland) if they read/subscribe to TechCrunch and remain amazed at how many folks have either never heard of it, or, only read it occasionally.  While shamelessly showcasing Panels while I am at it, here are some but of course not all of the interesting tidbits in just the last 24 hrs from the venerable TechCrunch:

• Apple, sans Steve Jobs, featured long time VP Phil Schiller and today has been widely regarded as a relatively lackluster affair. The Macworld Expo keynote in years past has been home to some very major product announcements, including the Macbook Air, the MacBook Pro, and perhaps most notably, the first iPhone. This year was a bunch of new software, a 17” MacBook Pro, and the removal of DRM from iTunes. More…
• Otalo, a vacation rentals search engine site, was just launched and looks impressive. What surprised me about this TC article is that some company called "HomeAway" raised $250 Million (with a valuation of a billion. Vacation rentals, who knew? More...
• Move Networks, which powers the Web video streaming for ABC, Fox, and others, reportedly streamed 180 million hours of premium video last year to 55 million viewers. More…
• Pandora, a free personalized internet radio service that has remained among the most popular iPhone apps on the iTunes App Store since its inception today released Pandora 2.0. According to TechCrunch the application will now include artist biographies, streaming samples for songs you’ve bookmarked, and perhaps most notably, the ability to create a station using a single song (much as you would using the iTunes Genius features). Other features in the new release include a CoverFlow-like view for song history, the ability to share stations with friends using Email, and a song progress bar (which has long been annoyingly absent). More…
• Intel reportedly isn’t happy about 12 Inch NetBooks, according to TechCrunch’s editors, who claim that new models from the likes of Dell, Samsung, and others are becoming more popular with consumers despite their serious limitations. More...

So, there’s five stories yesterday from TechCrunch. Sure there are other stories, and there are many other great tech sites, but for light, fun, informed, and a steady stream of tech news. I'm thinking of doing this once a week with the top web 2.0/software stories for my readers. But in the mean time, visit and/or subscribe to it.

ReadWriteWeb is in this same category of "must read" - I'll post about that useful and more technically oriented blog soon.

P.S. The article is much more useful with Panels, don't you think?

Panels v 1.0, circa 1999

It started here, with the nutrition panel, in 1999.

It was actually the winter of 1999 to be exact, and it was around the time I shook hands with the CEO of ImageX (then a high flying newly public company) to sell my company – Extensis, for about $140 million. Extensis also started and owned CreativePro.com, the first portal for the creative professional market segment. This is important for the story, as you see Extensis/CreativePro.com had grown to be an industry leading, profitable $24 million business selling graphics software to creative professionals all over the world. Funded by Adobe Ventures and H&Q Ventures (now Granite Ventures), we sold to the exact same customers as Adobe and, like them, had millions of users. It was a lot of fun, we built great products and kicked-ass.

This was the same time that the new bubble bible Industry Standard dominated the conversation in our industry. Back then, and for those who didn’t get it or are too young to remember, this magazine was often ½” thick and made it very clear that the web was taking over. “Creative Professionals” in particular were being affected so it dominated my thinking. Print was moving to the web in a big way, banner ads were the rage, and our customers were the ones creating them. We all have our own recollection of what happened next with Internet advertising, but what’s important for the story here is that we recognized as many have since 1999 that banner ads were wrought with problems and the industry needed a solution.

Knowing that I had the proverbial “desk by the door” having just signed to sell my company, I got a lot more serious about solving the “problems with internet advertising.” Dissecting a lot of research available at the time from Jupiter and others, and having a lot of conversations around our proposed solution, we distilled the “problem” down to two main, directly related, reasons why Internet (banner) ads didn’t work:

1)    There isn’t enough information about the ad to cause the user to act
2)    Even if there is enough information, the user doesn’t want to “detour”

We developed the “panel” to solve these two problems for any ad of any size from any network. The same problem still exists today, and though some ads are more targeted, these two keys problems persist. The nutritional panel was and remains our model and inspiration. We figured, and tested the hell out of it too, that if people could find out the who/what/where/when/why etc, without clicking or being interrupted – everybody would benefit! Specifically, users would get the info that want/need without leaving the page, Publishers could keep users on the page, and lastly the Advertisers’ ads would ultimately work better. Yes I know there are rollover from Pointroll, and others, we tested all of this before all of that in 2001/2002.

This is what panels looked like then vs. what you see today (examples on this blog.)
This is demo of a panel coming off of a BMW banner ad for the x5, back then our panel was the same width as banners by default. Today our panels are standard white, much smaller, and tabbed rather than specific regions as you see here - though we had tabs then too. You'll also note the "call to action" box on the bottom right, which have not yet exposed in the "new" panel.

We finished the system and rolled it out privately in 2002. And, it worked great, really great in fact. For now I’ll spare the details, but we delivered panels as a component of national campaigns for BusinessWeek, InFocus, and Adidas. Results were amazing. But, investors didn’t care. And we needed them. You see as we rolled it out the bubble had burst and we ushered in the “internet advertising nuclear winter.” We needed about $5 million basically just to turn on the system and run in for a quarter or two. There were just no funds available. “Internet advertising is dead, didn’t you hear?!” I heard this 20 times at least from VCs up and down Sand Hill Road and Highway 101. So, despite stellar results, proven success with real campaigns, there were no funds to be had. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

So, we mothballed the system, and the team and I started another company now called Attensa – focused on Enterprise RSS. We raised a little over $12 million for it over several years, which is not nearly enough for the enterprise business incidentally, but we built a best in class offering nevertheless. I left in April 2007 to focus on resurrecting “panels.”

“We’re getting the band back together”

The team has worked together on a few dozen projects over the past 20 years at Now Software, Extensis, Attensa, and Panels and our software is in use by millions. The guys have won a lot of awards too including various editors’ choice, eddy’s, people’s choice and even an “Apple Design Award.” Panels mainly consists of my long-time collaborator Eric Hayes (CTO), Eric Barnes (BizDEV), Russ Hayes (Web Czar), Kevin Fox (Product Manager/New Guy), and several other all-stars that we'll just have to call the horn section for now.

Panels Network a.k.a. “panels” is what we are now sharing in our public beta and rather than waste the space here just check out the web site at www.panels.net where there is a video demo. We have improved, streamlined, and retrofitted the technology to make blogs considerably more useful than ever before. Early stats and feedback has been phenomenal.

The objective of panels is identical to the original vision of satisfying the readers desire for real-time information, without interruption and doing so in a standard, predictable user interface. Panels is a rich platform, built to scale, and is already making people’s blog reading lives better.

It’s great getting the band back together.

OK, panels was early, sure, but it is by no means too late!

Here’s an excerpt from the letter I sent all of our shareholders about a year ago. 2003 was indeed a very tough time as we were just “too early.” I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve entered markets “late” and “just-in-time,” and with Panels we were simply too early. When I say too early, we were not too early for the market, we were too early for venture investors. To be clear, we finished and tested the platform, but the internet advertising bubble had not recovered.

What a difference 6 years makes: Back in 2002, our solution was self-serve (users will never go for it), all text by default (boring), required a line of javascript on web page (too hard, nobody will go for that!), and of course – “internet advertising is dead, didn’t you hear?” Google , especially with AdWords, was able to capitalize on all of these things – we weren’t, but now all of these things are understood and expected. Now, the timing is right for panels. Thanks Google for making all test, self-service, user-first, java script enabled technologies commonplace!

Here’s an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Panels shareholders early this year on our "timing":

...
Then vs. Now – When we suspended operations in early 2003, we had exhausted all means to continue, despite the fact that we completed development and deployed the system with astounding results. From 2000 – 2003, Panels Network essentially invented, or at least brought to market first, numerous capabilities that are now industry standard practices. As you recall, the technology bubble had burst, and internet advertising was perceived as “broken,” with investors leery of anything that touched the category.  Google and other companies like it the world over have proven that contention very, very wrong.

I am often asked, “Is the technology and opportunity still valid?” Well, I can confidently and unequivocally announce to you…Panels is now more than ever an opportunity of a lifetime. Substantial and numerous favorable conditions exist today that made it essentially impossible to move forward in 2003, including;

• Infrastructure Expenses: The capital outlays associated with the hardware/software/broadband requirements and associated personnel were too rich for most investors six years ago. We had earmarked ~$5MM to basically turn the system on in 2002. Time and progress has provided the company, and the industry in general, with a 20:1 improvement. Today our system runs on the “Amazon Cloud” and the related costs are “pay as you go” and in the $250K range in totality.

• Constituents Behavior: Consumers, Advertisers, and Publishers were skeptical of many technologies and practices proposed by the company in 2002 that have since become commonplace. The standardized, all-text, self service, one-size-fits-all internet advertising popularized by Google over the past 6 years was core to how our system worked (then and now.) Now, all constituents are familiar with the technologies that enable how panels work, such as javascript, and as a result we have several partners engaged for roll-out that have not required laborious missionary-selling.

Panels Beta 2008 and beyond

Panels is a massively scalable platform designed to give users a standard “nutrition panel” for any object on the internet – starting with breathing life into your blog’s links for businesses, schools, and non-profits. Users love them, they don’t interfere, and they just work! It takes a few minutes to add to any blog and automatically make it, well, amazing!

Our javascript implementation for blogs (and the widget) represents just the tip of the iceberg, as we will be rapidly extending the platform in many directions. As we move the system forward we see a lot of utility and potential with mobile platforms, rich data sources, plug-in clients, and more.

Panels is a game-changer. And we think you'll agree that blogs are much better with them than without them. There’s no reason to not give panels a try.

Please drop me a line any time with thoughts, ideas, comments at [email protected]

 

Transparency vs. Stealth...that is the question

I saved this wired article by Clive Thompson earlier this year about corporate transparency. It explains what "transparency" means in this web 2.0 world we are living in ranging from the CEO of Red Fin's utilization of transparency to shake things up in the residential real estate market to how some "venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak." I doubt they demand it, though it is worth noting that I did have to explain what a blog was to some of my VCs not so long ago. (And I'm definitely not going to be transparent about that one!)

Thompson writes this about Glen Kelman, Red Fin CEO:

Like some crazed convert, he trumpeted his epiphany: "I honestly believe that if Redfin were stripped absolutely bare for all the world to see, naked and humiliated in the sunlight, more people would do business with us." Follow me, he urged.

All I thought was, wow. That's bold. I like this guy already. I am a very aggressive competitor, and I love going to toe-to-toe with whomever, but sometimes it's the marketplace that needs to be hit over the head. Playing nice (or traditionally) just doesn't work sometimes. Take now for instance, I am spending an inordinate amount of time with powerpoint assisted "water-is-wet-and-the-sky-is-blue" pitches like there is no tomorrow. Changing the status quo is not easy and perhaps "transparency" is a key ingredient for paradigm shifting in high growth markets.

Stealth, Secrecy? Enter Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs practices the exact opposite of transparency - maybe we could call it paranoid stealthaphrania. To say steve fixed Apple and then some is an understatement. I think we can all agree that for a 1.0 the iPhone is pretty fucking cool. And it was all a secret. Yes, I know he is a CEO rockstar with bottomless pockets and arguably the world's strongest brand - but aside from that lame cube the products coming out of Apple are extraordinary.

So, yes, stealth works. And you don't have to be a rock star in my opinion to reap the benefits.

FeedBurner founder/CEO Dick Costolo talks about why stealth is dead, and transparency is good and he makes some good points, but I am still leaning Jobsian. Make his blog "ask the wizard" a must -read. So, since leaving the CEO post at Attensa in April I've been in stealth and getting ready to write about it. Not sure how I'll go about my blogging yet. But there will be a little bit of RSS in there somewhere! ; )

Technorati tags: Attensa, RSS, Red Fin, Transparency, Steve Jobs, Stealth, Glen Kelman

Attensa at O'Reilly ETech

For years we have been pitching to investors the budding problem of "information overload" and how RSS is causing users to attempt to drink from the proverbial firehose. Low and behold ETech in beautiful San Diego this weekend is completely focused on, yep, ATTENTION!

Attensa founder and VP R&D Eric Hayes and his team have been working on real-world massively scaleable attention metadata technologies longer than anyone else - starting back in 2000. In fact, because of his experience he was invited to co-author the attention.xml spec because it was clear to him that those who had authored it originally had never actually built such as system. We think his contributions have really helped the spec along. Eric's talk (not a sales pitch) on Attention is today:

AttentionStreams vs. the Firehose
Eric Hayes, Attensa
Track: Products & Services
Date: Tuesday, March 07
Time: 4:40pm - 5:25pm
Location: Elizabeth F

RSS is an information firehose and there is no adjustable nozzle to control the flow. The hose is on or it’s off. By using AttentionStream technology to intelligently analyze our information consumption patterns, new possibilities are emerging for prioritizing and recommending higher value content that cuts through information overload.

Its somewhat eerie, listening to all these folks talk about Attention in such a huge setting. That said, it is reassuring seeing so much interest. We've been working on this stuff for a while and while our AtttentionStream technology is for now only powering our synchronization capabilities. BUt more is coming and we love talking about where we're going, especially behind the firewall.

From the ETech home page, cool. Attention is going mainstream it appears! (Well mainstream for a bunch of leading edge technical industry folks!)

Welcome to the Attention Economy.

For the past five years, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference has found new networked innovations before they hit the mainstream.   We've showcased peer-to-peer networks and person-to-person mobile messaging, web services and weblogs, big-screen digital media and small-screen mobile gaming, hardware hacking and content remixing. We've hacked, blogged, ripped, remixed, tracked back, and tagged to the nth.

And as ETech marches on, the stuff of which it is made shows no sign of abating: bandwidth continues to broaden, cycles are going spare, storage grows ever larger and cheaper, and content keeps flowing from the fire - hose.   Yet our 60,000-year-old patterns of information processing haven't grown at the same pace.

This disparity is having a profound impact upon our social systems both on and offline, personal and business productivity, and the very future of so-called "knowledge work." The new network effects are going to be about attenuation—in a word: "less." Less raw data of the kind currently choking our inboxes and RSS readers, more intelligent sorting, synthesis, and routing of that data. Less noise, more signal. The businesses of the future will be built on delivering us less than the free services give us.

Technologies for creating, aggregating, and distributing data abound; the next important breakthroughs will be those that serve as the gatekeepers of our attention. As InfoWorld columnist Jon Udell puts it, "Devices are on or off. Channels are open or closed. The vast middle ground between those two states remains largely unexplored." It's in this middle ground that you'll find the technology challenge of 2006--and where you'll find the focus of this year's ETech.

Tags: O'Reilly ETech, attention, attention.xml, attensa, technorati, attenuation

Attention MetaData circa 2000

Last week Alex Barnett posted a podcast about Attention with guests Steve Gillmor (well known journalist and Chairman of AttentionTrust.org) and Joshua Porter (see his excellent web site Bokardo.) and his comments on the podcast interview. What caught my attention specifically in the podcast was also summarized by Joshua with:

"Steve’s vision is deep. He sees the whole art gallery, not just the Van Goghs. However, when Alex asks about his ideas concerning Gesture Bank, he sidesteps, fearing that he’ll give away too much. This, of course, was the reason why we asked him, of all people, to come talk to us. He doesn’t give away quite enough."

Steve is no doubt a smart guy. I've spoken with him several times, and I respect him as a journalist even though he seems to consistently contradict everyone else's viewpoint just for the hell of it (you can hear what I mean in the podcast.) At Attensa, we have committed to supporting the founding principles of Steve's AttentionTrust.org - well, we kind of are, we don't really think the rank and file knowledge worker will ever care about "managing" their attention proactively. We think people will want their "attention data" private if they were to actually think about it (they won't), and, they will just want stuff to work better for them with no effort on their part. But I'll defer debating end user's ability to care about any of this for another time.

What perked my ears was a comment on the podcast, to paraphrase, that he "didn't want to share his IP for free with startups so they could get another round of financing." Or words to that effect. I couldn't stop laughing. I wondered, is he talking about Attensa? Some other tech company? I immediately forwarded the message/podcast to Eric Hayes, Attensa co-founder and VP of R&D. Eric and I spoke with Steve in NYC at the offices of Root Markets after the BlogOn conference, and it appeared that he agreed about the significance of the opportunity with regard to attention and its specific application in the RSS area. We have always known Steve as a journalist, thought leader, and more recently Chairman of a non-profit - not a potential competitor. We'll see I guess.

Last summer at Gnomedex Technorati's Tantek Celik asked Eric Hayes to join as a co-author on the attention.xml spec. Why? Simple, after a 45 minute discussion between these two it became obvious, our technical team (led by Eric) has been working on this problem for a long time and knows, hands-on, a lot about it! At Syndicate in SF a few months ago our guys and others at Technorati teamed up and announced the move the spec over to the microformats site.

We have some 20 man years into our infrastructure that began in 2000, yes 2000, although then we referred to our work as "Transient Meta Data" so I do admit we adopted the "Attention" moniker as more clarity evolved in this area. Steve G. may have started kicking around the idea with David Sifry at Technorati three years ago but our infrastructure was processing some one million attention metadata micro transactions per minute on our development servers in 2000. That said much has changed in 6 years and there are a lot more to our AttentionStreams than just RSS.

There is room for many players in this space ranging from those focused on solving information overload through RSS to those dedicated to improving the overall quality of  internet advertising. At Attensa, we are focusing on the former - for Business. And we're starting with RSS.

P.S. Eric tells me he has an e-mail from Alex Barnett to do a podcast interview on this very subject, so look for that soon I hope! Most of the attention discussions to date have been around ideas, not experienced implementation, and Eric has been tasked with stepping up and participating in these discussions.

Tags: Attention, AttentionTrust.org, Attention.xml, RSS, Attensa, microformats, Gnomedex

Attention Podcast informative, and here's Attensa's $.02

I just listened to Alex Barnett’s podcast focused on Attention with Nick Bradbury (FeedDemon developer and AttentionTrust board member) and Kevin Burton (Tailrank) and Rojo co-founder) and it can be downloaded here. These are two reallly smart guys but we'd like to chime on this disucssion because we eat, sleep, and breathe attention.

A lot of thoughts came to mind listening to the podcast but I will leave the heavy lifting to one of my co-founders, Eric Hayes, a co-author of the attention.xml spec and one of several smart guys that have been working on an attention based infrastructure for years. Ideally we’d like to get online with Alex and explain what we have essentially already implemented that goes far beyond the discussion points in the podcast. While it has only been 6 months or so since we adopted the “attention” moniker to describe our technology, it is the foundation of what we have been doing for years.

The biggest challenge (and we agree attention.xml can’t handle it) is processing a massive amount of information, in near real-time, and gleaning not only useful metadata (from what we call the attention stream) but to do something really valuable with that information. We believe that is an improved experience - not better ad targeting (Google, MSN and Yahoo can focus on that I suppose)

Attensa’s business model is around just that. Your behavior will automatically improve your experience. In a collaborative work environment? Even better!

Alex, Nick, and Kevin got on the subject of standardization. As we have committed at Attensa, we will support attention.xml and have been instrumental in offering our experience in this area in reshaping and improving the spec based on our real world experience. However, we agree it is not likely to work on a massive scale with a seemingly infinite quantity of transient metadata being generated. Attensa’s strategy is predicated upon addressing the challenge of how to effectively manage very large amounts of seeminly unmanageable attention data.

So, where does that put Attensa in the debate of “does the user own their attention?” Well, our company has already publicly committed as a member of the AttentionTrust.org to its four founding principles. Where we diverge from many is that we feel the manner in which we create and utilize attention data and deliver useful benefits to individuals and businesses – that is not something we share. That is Attensa’s intellectual property. More on this as we roll out our attention based services.

Ultimately, we envision any aggregator can potentially benefit from Attensa processing attention streams (replete with strict anonymity and privacy adherence) to improve the user experience and help mitigate information overload.

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.

TiVo needs attention, not searchable ads

TiVo is going to allow you to search for ads, and even allow you to enter keywords. Huh? Who is going to do that? Magazines have that advertiser index somewhere in back, and I think I’ve used it once or twice in my life…is that the same thing? This is TV, and unless the ad is really funny (or its of two women scantily clad wrestling in a fountain over whether or not a beer tastes great or is less filling) I doubt this will matter to anyone. Besides everyone emails the good/funny/sexy ads anyway…

Doing smart things with attention data is the way to better target folks with relevant ads. It’s not what we are doing at Attensa, we are not looking at PVRs just yet, but philosophically this is the way to make ads more relevant to folks. The story in the WSJ I read this a.m. explained how users would be able to manually keyword “BMW” or "cruises" as examples, and then users might see relevant ads later. You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t get it. So TiVo needs a keyboard now for THIS?! (BTW their remote already has too many buttons, maybe it will require the 12 key "texting" method to type.) IMHO, these new developments are not a real benefit to users, this is a way to attempt to appease advertisers to not run for the hills as PVR wrecks the decades old broadcast TV advertising model. I could be wrong but I think people want to only see the shows listed they want to watch and in the order of “favorites first, mediocre next, and delete the crap so I don’t have to – oh, and do it as it relates to me PERSONALLY." Right? Oh and incidentally, why did I buy this thing in the first place? To SKIP THE ADS!

At Attensa we are presently focused on this same value proposition for users, only as it relates to RSS items. We are all going to drown in RSS items just as many drown in the abundance of TV channels – and it is going to be a lot worse as you get a few thousand items a day delivered to your aggregator of choice. The difference in the long run though is it will be IMPORTANT STUFF you receive via RSS, not just entertainment on TV. It won’t be just blog updates or news, it will be flight confirmations, business analytics, database updates, secure ecommerce transactions, etc. etc. etc. RSS is touching every business process and up and down the supply chain.

We probably should look at how our attention stream technology could apply to TiVo or other PVR technologies. Once you have a TiVo you can’t imagine watching TV without one. I’ve never longed for the ability to search for an ad while using it, but I would like to tuen it on and the first 5 things listed are things I REALLY want to watch. Attention can deliver. Will be fun to see what they come up with to benefit the users (those who pay for the service) that has nothing to do with advertising. Just a better user experience.

Attention has arrived

Attention has arrived!

What a difference a week makes! I spent most of last week in NYC and at Ad-Tech, the premier internet advertising conference, and was reminded of more exuberant times in 1999 before the bubble burst. The sold out conference in my opinion emanated an enthusiasm not experienced since those times, but for many of us the exciting part was not just the expansion of F1000 marketers’ dormant budgets but the willingness of these major brands in exploring RSS as an advertising vehicle ahead of the curve. It appears that nobody wants to be left out, and questions were rampant about the emerging RSS medium. Of course most of the interest was surrounding blogs, but by the next event all will surely be aware of the pervasive nature of RSS and how much more it is than just a means to get blog updates.

That said, and selfishly speaking on behalf of Attensa, you can’t get very far contemplating RSS as an advertising medium without running into the obvious benefits of attention metadata. Yes, it’s a mouthful to the uninitiated, but it seems this week a lot more folks are paying attention to attention.

Yes, attention has arrived…

• Steve Gillmor eats sleeps and breathes attention (as he sees it) as President of AttentionTrust.org. And he pokes fun at OPML champion Dave Winer.
• AttentionTech is focused on it exclusively in their podcasts
• Seth Goldstein’s RootMarkets just launched their beta and their business depends on it. I met Seth at his office a few weeks ago and their project looks really interesting. Check it out.
• Joshua Porter’s Bokardo, author of a web 2.0 focused blog I recently encountered, covers several interesting subject but a lot on attention data lately. Here is a great post entitled “why should I trust Microsoft with my attention data?” and another about AttentionTrust and its philosophy about why you should own your attention data. I just subscribed.
• Scoble has commented more frequently recently...you are probably already subscrtibed to his blog, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
• While “attention” was not used in the press releases or in commentary by its executives, Microsoft’s adCenter will certainly use attention in ways we have not yet seen by the ad networks. Here's a blurb on marketing vox about it if you hadn't heard.
• Though they are being their traditional sneaky selves about it, Google’s Personalized Search is essentially about attention data gathering and leveraging it to improve search!
• The Attention.xml spec over at Technorati is waking up (improved radically by Attensa’s own Eric Hayes incidentally) and if we have anything to do with it there is more to come as Eric was invited as a co-author earlier this year.
• Last but not least, RSS infrastructure company Attensa closed its Series B financing last weekto expand development and roll out its attention network (more on this any day now!) and our blog will include more frequent postings as well. By the way, we are hiring!

The team here at Attensa has been working on sophisticated attention metadata infrastructure since early 2001 (only then we just called it personalized transient metadata because we hadn’t heard of the term “attention” yet.) At Attensa, our first step is to release our RSS reader for Microsoft Outlook, and we believe it to be best of class in terms of performance and ease of use. But the real sea change will occur for users of our technology when our "attention streams" automatically improve the gathering and use of RSS delivered information to the point where you will wonder how you ever got along with plain old “raw” RSS articles derived via standard RSS subscriptions.

Viva Attention!

Office 12 and RSS

Some Office 12 screen shots displaying RSS were posted recently (and have been before) and it has brought to the surface the usual inquiries about the impact on our business and our plans here at Attensa. We have known this was coming for some time. In fact, it’s kind of obvious, and would no doubt be seen as a lazy omission if Microsoft did not include the feature in some capacity in this new release. We are often asked at Attensa how we feel about this inevitable reality….well; we are stoked that Microsoft/Windows/Office embraces RSS going forward.

Why?

1)      Ubiquitous RSS is good. At Attensa we believe that pervasive use of RSS benefits everybody and that makes our technology more valuable. Who better than Microsoft (and Google and Yahoo) to educate and make available basic RSS capabilities? Attensa is about value-add, not the inevitably commoditized RSS reader. We, and our investors (announcement coming soon), are betting that over the next several years Microsoft will do the heavy lifting and educate the masses of the benefits of adopting RSS.

2)      But RSS is dumb. Already users are subscribing to dozens of feeds and receiving hundreds of posts per day. And it is only going to get worse as marketers utilize RSS in lieu of traditional internet media. Further, the enterprise and enterprise application vendors are embracing RSS for every conceivable task. As RSS users (whether through Outlook 12 or the common RSS reader) we will soon all be drinking from the proverbial fire hose. The problem will dwarf email inbox overload. At Attensa think this a big opportunity worth solving.

3)      With RSS “less is more” At Attensa our business and technology focus is improving the RSS experience through real-time attention stream analytics – the fact that we have or will soon have best of class solutions for Outlook, Mobile, Online and more is almost incidental. Long term (i.e. once Outlook 13 or 14 finally gets it right) our attention stream infrastructure will sit quietly, behind the scenes, making the defacto standard RSS reader simply “work better.”

4)      Outlook 12 adoption happens when? In the meantime, and surveying the competitive climate for readers and pondering the en masse adoption of Outlook 12 in the enterprise (early 2008?) we think there is considerable opportunity to provide quality RSS experience for users of Outlook 2000 and later for the foreseeable future. As for Outlook 12, I think most would agree without even seeing it that there will be considerable opportunity to make it better.