Play with the Machine » attention

Finding a groove

gavin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:59:09 +0000

I had some issues early on with Twitter
. That was from 2006. My first “official” twittering was from May 2008. Initially, my issues with Twitter were the “me to you” nature of it. And like I mentioned in the 2006 post, I had plenty of ways of doing that already.

But its finally clicking with me. Twitter is an excellent “you to me” service. And the reasons why? The enforced brevity of each message and the simple controls for following/not following. Simple. Twitter wins over the traditional vendor email update subscription hands down.

Here are a few of my favorites.

amazonmp3 describes itself as “DRM-free Music Downloads from Amazon. Tweets on our Daily Deal and Friday 5.” Which means you get a tweet everyday that looks something like this:

8/20 Daily Deal: Smile by Brian Wilson. Everyday low price $9.99, today’s price $3.99. http://snurl.com/34×4m

All you have to do is click the url and buy.

99rental‘s bio is “Keeping you up-to-date on the weekly 99 cent movie rental on iTunes.” With a typical tweet looking like:

99¢ Movie: El Mariachi http://tinyurl.com/68b4h8

Again, simple, to the point, easy to act on.

Lastly, timoreilly is my personal Twitter aggregator. He “retweets” pertinent, useful and informative tweets from other folks using Twitter. A recent tweet:

Retweet @allennoren: A round-up of books about Darfur. If you don’t have time to read them, but want to know, read http://tinyurl.com/5zxp4z

Always fascinating how a service evolves. A lot can happen in two years. I’m not a prolific Twitter user by any means but I’m definitely benefiting from it.

Crocodile guilt

gavin — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:34:54 +0000

An interesting quote from Mark Bernstein about why conferences aren’t such fun places these days:

Still more fundamentally, the mass of guilt that weighs upon the field deadens our conferences. That guilt arises from the divergence of what we like from what we think we should like. We enjoy exciting new systems that do what nothing else could do; we think we should like systematic demonstrations that this widget lets students do a task 5% faster than that one. We enjoy daring prototypes and agile development; we think we should be planning our work and proving correctness. We enjoy astonishing code; we think we should write code so clear that our most mediocre students (and the management team) will grasp it without effort.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking but maybe some of that guilt comes from our lack of attention. Nowadays it is so easy to be physically present, yet mentally worlds away. With wifi & mobile service, you can be happily IMing or Twittering about the speaker with the monotone delivery anywhere.

So to that guy that was sitting next to me, typing madly and muttering to himself, during a really interesting session, I wished your batteries died and you lost all network connections and your pen ran out of ink. Time to face the present champ.

Remembering how to think

gavin — Wed, 17 May 2006 14:13:10 +0000

As an experiment, I decided to kill my aggregator. The idea was to take the few handfuls of feeds I really enjoy and/or depend on, put them back in my browser and use Firefox’s nice “Open In Tabs” feature. Within a week I was hooked on my new method and a little angry. Turns out I was duped. I believed my aggregator was a helpful tool and the week without demonstrated just how unhelpful it really is. Current aggregators are adjustable shovels—could be a little garden trowel or maybe a huge diesel-powered back hoe. Lucky you! Your job is to poke through the mound of content they so quickly made for you with a pair of tweezers, rooting out the good bits. So I was angry at myself for wasting time and for falling down the dead-end technology trap once again. Nothing is for free; your attention is precious.

A few interesting attention-related articles have been bubbling up the various meme sites: Why can’t you pay attention anymore? from CNET and Linda Stone’s talk on Continous Partial Attention. Just what an info junkie hypochondriac needs.