The devouring dragon of Facebook and Twitter

This image from illustrator Jess3 captures my feelings about Facebook and Twitter -- not only for Facebook's evolving invasion of our privacy as shown in my last post, but for the loss of time and money and persona that these two social media demons devour.

You can fimd more of Jess3 images on Slideshare JESS3 Presentations

Nice imagination, Jess!

Noise Creep?

I have been watching the rising tide of concern for the increase in the garbage quotient in the blogosphere and the declining quality of the content of online conversations. Just the other day it was Scoble who admittd to being inundated with Twits from his followers(it's his own fault IMO) and today Seth Godin, another A-list blogger, sounds off on the same theme:

Seth's Blog: Signal to noise:

"Lately, I’m feeling noise creep.

Lately, the noise seems to be increasing and the signal is fading in comparison. Too much spam, too many posts, too little insight leaking through. I don’t use Twitter, but I know a lot of Twitter users are feeling this. So are folks who go to too many conferences. And don’t get me started on victims of Blackberry cc: disease.

I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can’t. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem."

It sure is, Seth. We're caught in a death spiral of Twittering, Facebooking, Texting, and IM-ing, which Professor BJ Fogg, at the Stanford Center for Persuasive Technologies admiringly calls Massive Interpersonal Persuasion (MIP). As it becomes increasingly difficult to filter out the signal from the rising tide of noise, we are squandering our most precious asset ....Attention!

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?

Are Crowds Intelligent Life Forms?

You are looking at the Head Lemur who pens raving lunacy which I put on my
my google reader just to sample his oxymoronic humor - which is often pointed in a similar direction to my own exploration of how to refine the "landfill" of the web into useful nuggets suitable for digestion by the folks afflicted with the disease continuous partial attention (CPA).Thoughts Illustrated: Who is Linda Stone and why should we listen to her?

I agree with the raving lunatic's comment:

" One of the most remarkable things about the Internet is the awesome amount of information that is out here. You can find something on just about anything here. But this place is like a huge library where the shelves are empty and the books are piled on the floor. The pile is getting bigger as another truckload has just been delivered in the backdoor. It is all here, but it has little structure or form."

Perhaps the Head Lemur and I can find a way to build a pilot refinery. I intend to risk being subjected to his rapier-like wit, if I can get on his wave length.

raving lunacy: Are Crowds Intelligent Life Forms?

Ant Trail No.2 - finding information Architects!

This Ant Trail leads to Information Architects in Tokyo,a dynamite design resource for all things Internet.

The trail will be entirely visual, without associated links. It will give me a visual
platform for my meeting with Robert Scoble in early March. In meeting with Robert, I hope to help him overcome his problem of continuous partial attention. (CPA) that I mentioned in previous posts.

iA's interface design rules make great visual sense to me, and I am hoping to find a way to redesign this blog so that it follows the iA rules. I think they would be equally applicable to Scobleizer and the Scoble Video Show.

Let's start on the trail with Netvibes
dave davison's home page (22)
followed by the link to
which contains the link to iA which led me to this really powerful statement: The Interface is the Brand ( which relates to my prior posts on the iPhone and its need for radical simplification). iA gets it just right with this post: Information Architects Japan

and then finally a payoff for my meeting with Robert Scoble - this table rating popular blogs showing that Scobleizer has a way to go in its design.


Ain't discovery grand? I hope Robert will agree.

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

The link above is not live. If this post interests you there will be a link to Linda later on in the post.

Here's the preamble:

My Friend Mark Safranski(ZenPundit) alerted me to The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 which contains as Idea #7 a description by Linda Stone of her extremely apt phrase for our chaotic times: "Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)" .

I think Linda's phrase ranks right up there with Information Anxiety and Future Shock in drawing our attention to how technology is creating a condition I call "too much stuff - too little time" which gets worse as the dilemma of information overload and attention scarcity continues unabated.

Although she first coined the phrase CPA in 1997 during her work at Microsoft, I first heard Linda use it in a speech she gave at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference last year.The entire talk (28 min.) is worth listening to and you can download it to your playlist or listen to it here: IT Conversations: Linda Stone

Here's an abstract of Linda's concept of CPA

"This constant checking of handheld electronic devices has become epidemic, and it illustrates what I call 'continuous partial attention.' Although continuous partial attention appears to mimic that much discussed behavior, multitasking, it springs from a different impulse. When we multitask, we are trying to be more productive and more efficient, giving equal priority to all the things we do—simultaneously filing or copying papers, talking on the phone, eating lunch, and so forth. Multitasking rarely requires much cognitive processing, because the tasks involved are fairly automatic. Continuous partial attention, by contrast, involves constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing. It’s an adaptive behavior that has emerged over the past two decades, in stride with Web-based and mobile computing, and it connects us to a galaxy of possibilities all day every day. The assumption behind the behavior is that personal bandwidth can match the endless bandwidth technology offers."

Stone argues that personal bandwidth is not up to the task and, as a result, a backlash to continuous partial attention has already started. She also worries that information overload will burn people out much more quickly as they strain to keep up with an increasing number of information sources all screaming for attention.

It has been my passion since I began posting on this blog 10 months ago to seek ways to provide solutions to this dilemma, solutions which I believe rest on the ideal developed years ago by the architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. His axiom " Less is more" is my guiding principle.

As I find useful tools for compressing and synthesizing the chaos of content on the Internet I will share them with you, so you won't have to feel like this guy who obviously is suffering from CPA!