Standing for Attention in the Enterprise

I have been back for a couple of days and have to say that it is hard to get the brain going after forcefully disengaging myself from work-partially because i just have so much i want to do and can't figure out where to start.

But have no fear something ALWAYS gets my brain going just when i thought it was giving out on me- what is that something? spending time with clients and remembering that information delivery in the enterprise-even with all the nifty little web 2.0 tools out there still has a long way to go.

One of today's interesting conversations that got my attention was when RSS delivery was brought up as an option to deliver company and industry specific content (news, financial reports etc.) to teams that might be working on specific client engagements and using wikis as a collaboration point. The interesting thing is not that we were talking about RSS to do this but that fact that it seems that in a little less then two years, I have gone from having conversations about 'what is RSS' to 'wow, there just is too much of it, the tools to use it are cumbersome and we just can't deal with it'.

i have certainly seen the increased adoption of RSS as a delivery mechanism of content in the enterprise (especially news content)- but i still haven't seen an enterprise tool that is blowing every one's socks off. Many talk about the new Office platform and IE7 as a potential - but from what i have seen so far it might just be a stop-gap as it stands- a tool for new users of RSS that will quickly be outgrown because of the volume of content being produced and the need for the consumers of that content to be able to manage it efficiently.

So something that i know i will be talking about in 2007 is... Attention

And i won't be the only one paying attention to 'Attention'

i had already started this post on Attention and i remembered that in my inbox was a note from Greg Narian with the subject title 'Continuous Partial Postponement?' that i had seen coming in this morning but had not clicked through before i left for my appointments. It is an interesting look at two sides of the attention theme. The first one Continuous Partial Attention - constantly needing to be connected so we don't miss anything, the second is what we lose when as we constantly postpone one thing to get to the next. Kathy Sierra also has a good post on the problem of continuous partial attention from early December that links to multiple posts she has made about user behavior due to attention issues.

We are starting to see some of the main players in the RSS reader market address the need to manage a users 'attention'- the big news this week is Google Reader's trends which provides some reading trends for the user which is one step towards what their 'attention' is. Some have been talking about it for a while like the folks over at Touchstone who have an Attention Engine that i have been using (gem: found this good overview of their current Alpha here). and are taking the lead on APML (attention profiling mark-up language) which is an open standard for encapsulating a summary of a users interests based on their access across various tools, devices, tools etc. All things that i think are going to be needed in one way or another to help get the right information to enterprise users when they need it as well as assist in the knowledge sharing we are constantly looking for -so what is Joe the expert at XYZ paying attention to?