The Ant Trail - A web research journey using Grazr

I got a query on Facebook from Nancy White about how FB is used by high school and college kids, I remembered that studying teens' use of social networks is Danah Boyd's specialty so I linked to her website, where I found Danah answering Scoble about the condition that I have referred to as Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) or ambient friendship, or AORTA(always on, real time, anywhere)

this post features a use of the Grazr Web Research tool which enables me to "capture" of the Ant Trail by just dragging and dropping links, clips, photos, videos, podcasts from the brower "canvas" to the sidebar.

Shown in the sidebar is the resultant CB widget, which I have called AORTA and which I can edit and embed on any webpage( like this one), and with the widget's Firefox extension, can serve as the AntTrail "collector" as I discovery-surf the web.

This post is really personal exploration and I hope as we launch a ConversationBase version of Grazr in the next few weeks to make good use of the "drag and drop" Web Research the tool offers to bloggers and pass the good news along.

The Creative Tension of CPA

In February I posted this in response to the increasing notice of Linda Stone's meme "Continuous Partial Attention".

Thoughts Illustrated: Who is Linda Stone and why should we listen to her?

Today I will meet with Stowe Boyd who argues with Stone that the Social Presence tools like Twitter and Pownce, and to some degree, Facebook, offer a "flow" experience that we need to accept as a "gift" from our AORTA technologies.

Perhaps Stowe can enlighten me on how he manages his "flow"

Although this is from an article in InfoWeek last February it restates the key issue in designing tools for collaboration for enterprise.

"For the Enterprise 2.0 strategy to work, it's essential that Web collaboration tools be used to streamline communications. If they just add another channel, they'll only make the communication and collaboration problem worse."

Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business -- InformationWeek Daily --
InformationWeek:

As we consider integrating a social presence tool in our collaboration suite, we need a way to "manage" the multiple channels competing for our attention. I think the solution will be to provide meta-level visualization of the flow so we can comprehend its meaning. David Brin's Holocene vision?

Lunching with Scoble

After a lifetime of accusations of my being a verbal "firehose", I met my match yesterday at lunch at Mike's restaurant with The Scobleizer. It was a truly enjoyable experience. Robert seems to have perfected the ability to integrate his in-person reality with his online presence. He radiates intelligence, good humor and an openness in conversation which is a rare combination - and probably the reason he continues to attract such a large following in the blogosphere and in F2F interactions with the movers and shakers of the geek world.

I first met Robert at Meshforum in May 2006 Thoughts Illustrated: Meshforum - Scoble and Israel on Naked Conversations where he stimulated my curiosity and interest in how he and Shel Israel approached the creation of Naked Conversations - an early version of what I call the Networked Book.

During our lunch yesterday, Robert explained the rationale for his Scoble Show - a relaxed- style interview show featuring hot Silicon Valley CEOs telling their stories and demonstrating their products. Here's a recent example: Inside a real Silicon Valley garage startup: Maya's Mom | PodTech.net: Technology, Business, Media, and News Podcasts. Robert is rapidly accelerating his video interview production, recording 3-4 video interviews per week. He now has a large backlog of wannabe's lined up to be interviewed on his show and expects to select a "Top 40" from his show portfolio when he has enough footage in his playlist archive.

If you are interested in how The Scoble Show integrates with Podtech's business model, scroll down the right side of the page linked above and you will see the logos of 39 high-class Scoble Show sponsors. John Furrier's recruiting of Robert Scoble to be a centerpiece of PodTech's NewMedia business is clearly paying off.

Robert also showed me how he uses google reader to keep up with his prodigious daily blog reading and posting efforts and gave me a short guided tour of how he uses Twitter / Scobleizer to keep up with his many contacts in real time.

Great lunch - and an in-person confirmation of the unique social networking power of the NewMedia to connect and engage people in "naked conversations" on a global basis. Also solid evidence of my friend Mark Anderson's Thoughts Illustrated: Mark Anderson-Welcome to the Blogosphere!support for the AORTA (Always On Real Time Access) concept of today's technology-enabled society. Here's how Mark described it way back in 1998:

"With AORTA, users tend to transfer all work to Net-enabled applications, and to use email, Inet chat, collaboration software, and Inet telephony as easily as they used to use the phone."

Robert Scoble is the living, breathing exemplar of AORTA in action and, boy, does it work for him!