CONTINUOUS PARTIAL ATTENTION - AGAIN

This image from VisualsSpeak artist Christine Martell shows how I feel when I consider the CPA dilemma of my digital lifestream. I mentioned Linda Stone's coinage of the term CPA here Thoughts Illustrated: Who is Linda Stone and why should we listen to her?

Christine places this image in her Options portion of the VisualsSpeak image gallery. Take a look - you might find just the image you need from her expanding collection, mostly from her own artistry.VisualsSpeak LLC

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.

A Brief Message - twitter vs blogger?

Although this image is from a new blog on design, it could certainly apply to the dilemma of continuous partial attention (CPA) and from the punch line "short is in", it would appear that microblogging as in Twitter meets the criteria outlined above.

My take is that Return on Attention (ROA) thrives on "short is in" and that pithy text and powerful images deliver content in the most effective way, but my experience to date with Twitter is very mixed.


I need is a way to filter the incoming flood so that it raises the signal above the noise. Maybe my conversation with Adam Green of Grazr this afternoon will shed some light on how to manage microblogs along with all the other social networking stuff.

PS this post would have exceeded the Twitter 140 character limit by the second sentence. If short is in, maybe I'm out!

A Brief Message

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.