Are your feeds turning into too many long tails? Filter!
SAN FRANCISCO -- There were so many ways to participate in last week's Supernova conference that actually directing one's gaze to the speakers onstage seemed somehow old-fashioned. The ballroom at the Palace Hotel was full of attendees with open laptops that were plugged into power strips on the floor and tuned into one of several WiFi networks that suffused the room with signals. When a speaker paused to take a breath, the silence was filled with the clicking of a hundred keyboards.
The action on the dais, which featured speakers such as Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz and videogame gunslinger Dennis ''Thresh" Fong, was overshadowed by what was happening on the Web. There were numerous Weblogs dedicated to the event, a collaboratively written Wiki, a channel for real-time text chat, phone cam photos posted to sites like Flickr.com, a fusillade of video interviews conducted by Brookline author (and blogger) David Weinberger, a series of audio podcasts, and something called an attention stream.
The conference was ostensibly about how pervasive Internet connectivity, innovative software, and new devices are changing the way we communicate and work. But the meta-theme of the conference was the phenomenon that Linda Stone, a former executive at Microsoft and Apple, has dubbed ''continuous partial attention."
Continuous partial attention is that state most of us enter when we're in front of a computer screen, or trying to check out at the grocery store with a cellphone pressed to an ear -- or blogging the proceedings of a conference while it's underway. We're aware of several things at once, shifting our attention to whatever's most urgent -- perhaps the chime of incoming e-mail, or the beep that indicates the cellphone is low on juice. It's not a reflective state.
Full attention, Stone suggested in her talk at Supernova, will be ''the aphrodisiac of the future." (Which implies that those of us living in a state of continuous partial attention may not be, um, getting much action.)
While full attention was in short supply at Supernova, the conversation was thick with concepts and terms that may be familiar to those who marinate daily in the blogosphere, but are novel to those of us who are still retrograde enough to read (or write for) an ink-on-dead-trees publication. Let me try to explain a few:
Blogosphere
The interconnected realm of Web logs. Stories are said to ''gain traction" in the blogosphere when numerous bloggers comment on them, and link to one another's comments. (Yes, the blogosphere can feel a bit insular and self-referential at times.) Sites like Bloglines.com and Technorati.com maintain lists of the most popular blogs.
Tagging
Affixing labels, usually just one word, to blog entries, photos, or other pieces of content to describe what they're about. Content can be tagged by its author, or by those who read, view, or listen to it. One way to see how tags work is at the photo publishing site Flickr.com (www.flickr.com/photos/tags), where you can search for photos tagged ''Redsox."
Attention stream
A relatively new concept, an attention stream gathers all the content that shares the same tag, regardless of where it lives on the Internet, and presents it on the same page. For an event like Supernova, that might include photos and blog entries that have been tagged ''Supernova." It provides an impressionistic picture of what people are thinking and talking about, as well as what they're taking snapshots of.
Wikis
A website (or even just a single Web page) that can be created and maintained by a group of people. Wikipedia, the best-known example, is a collaboratively written encyclopedia. The Los Angeles Times attempted this month to use a wiki to allow anyone to help write an editorial for the paper, but the experiment was suspended after some users posted pornographic material on the page, or used inappropriate language.
The long tail
Imagine a graph showing the amount of money earned by every movie made in 2004. On the left, you've got the hits, which made millions at the box office. But toward the right, you've got a ''long tail" of movies that either didn't make much or made absolutely nothing, because they were made but never released. That right side of the graph is what Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson refers to as ''the long tail."
''At a certain point, things aren't economically viable to distribute," Anderson said at Supernova, referring to niche content.
But today, using the Internet as a distribution mechanism, music, video, books, and other products that previously wouldn't have found an audience, or generated revenue, can. NetFlix.com, which carried many DVDs that the corner video store couldn't afford to stock, is an example of a ''long tail" business.
Filters
They will be necessary to help sort through the mess of choices that the long tail presents. Professional critics are filters, but so is the NetFlix.com recommendation service, software that suggests movies you might enjoy, based on how you've rated movies you've already seen. Friends and family members might also be filters, pointing you to content they think you'll be interested in. Future versions of TiVo, for instance, might let you designate a friend who'd help fill your set-top box with the best foreign films or cooking shows.
Reputation systems
How do you know whether you can trust someone you're interacting with online? On eBay, buyers and sellers leave feedback for one another based on how each has behaved in the course of a transaction. In other places, your reputation might be based on whether the community perceives your advice on Italian hotels to be valuable. But reputation systems are still in their infancy.
Feeds
Regularly updated streams of information, such as headlines from recent blog entries or news stories. Feed readers, also known as RSS readers or aggregators, allow a user to organize the various feeds he might subscribe to. (RSS stands for ''really simple syndication," a way for bloggers or more traditional publishers to produce feeds.) Rather than hunting for information all over the Web, a feed reader organizes it in one place.
During a break at the Supernova conference, I ran into a Forrester Research analyst, Charlene Li, and asked her whether all these new tools and notions mean the Web is being reinvented. Not really, she said. ''The Web has always been about self-publishing and self-expression," Li said. ''It's just that in the early days, people weren't really ready to take advantage of it."
But if the Web itself isn't being remade, it's certainly remaking us in fascinating ways.
BlackBerry Shoot-Out
Think you've got the fastest thumbs in the East? Do you dash off lengthy missives while waiting for traffic lights to change? I'm planning a BlackBerry Invitational Tournament as part of a next week's column. It will involve responding to three e-mail messages from me. (And you don't have to be a BlackBerry user. Treo 600s or other e-mail devices with keys the size of sunflower seeds are eligible.) To compete, send me an e-mail today with your name, the device you use, and how long you've been using it.
Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Fast Company. He can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. 