2aldgate.net

Herbert Simon writing in 1971 about the Attention Economy

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it

- From Designing for the Social Web (which I am now reading) by Joshua Porter.

Some quick thoughts and reactions to the MacWorld 2008 Keynote.

My first reaction is that I guess I am a little underwhelmed.

I am guessing that when I see the MacBook Air for the first time in person that it will be love at first sight, but I’ve got a MacBook Pro and I love that and there is no way that I could justify purchasing another laptop. I do wonder how well it would run World of Warcraft though.

On AppleTV, if it had a Blue-ray DVD player built in, I might consider it. If it had the Blue-ray plus some DVR functionality, then I would definitely buy it and happily pay twice what they are asking. We just got a beautiful new HDTV during Christmas and as predicted it has become a little bit of a puppy - meaning that you can’t just get an HDTV, you need to get food and shots and a bunch of other things with it. (We’ve basically redone our entire living room including new furniture since Christmas because of the television - pictures later.) If I weren’t thinking about a new car later in the month, given what AppleTV “Take 2″ is still missing, I probably would head out today to buy a PS3 for the Blue-ray DVD player and a Tivo Series 3 HD-DVR for the DVR functionality.

(Note: I do very understand that including both of these features are opposed to the iTunes model and are extremely unlikely to happen in the next or the next beyond that AppleTV, but if Apple wanted to dominate the living room like they do with portable media players, then this is the table stakes. Ideally, AppleTV should simplify my living room without forcing me to abandon my current investment in DVDs or my Tivo lifetime subscription. I don’t think I am quite ready to make that leap yet, but given the opportunity, I’d love to replace 3 devices with one that also allows me to leverage at least some of my previous investment in physical media and doesn’t completely lock me into a PPV model).

On the iPhone update, well, I’ve been actively clicking the iTunes check for update button since the update was announced during the keynote and just about 1 minute ago, the update to my phone was completed. The updates are all seem pretty nice (I haven’t played with them yet), but none of them totally knock my socks off. What I wanted most of all was for my To Do’s and Notes to sync to the phone. Unfortunately, I guess I am still going to have to wait for that.I think the huge news about the iPhone is that it appears that the SDK is still on track for (late) February. I am really looking forward to when this happens.

Other than that, I was hoping for an OS update. I know it is coming and can wait a little bit, but it would have been nice to have it today Also, I had hoped (even though I didn’t believe it would happen) for a next generation Newton. That would have been something for which I would have gone and stood in line.

I realize that being underwhelmed is simply because I have such high expectations for Apple (so carry on Apple..). I have little doubt that they will be knocking my socks off again sometime soon. It just wasn’t today.

Ok…well, now all of the software updates are available, so I need to reboot (and play)!

It has been almost a year and a half since Adam and I first presented our thoughts on Web 2.0 to the MITX CEO Roundtable. Since that time, as a part of our day job, we’ve had the privilege of sharing our perspective and our thinking with a number of other folks. As would be expected, as we have had these discussions and as others have had similar discussions (which we’ve watched with huge interest), our initial thinking has evolved and I think has become much clearer.

You might think that after 18 months that we’d be past a point of definition and explanation, but our experience (even as late as last Thursday) is that we aren’t there just yet. There are a (surprising) number of people who are still struggling to understand what Web 2.0 is and what it means to them (and, in turn, to their businesses). One of the most significant challenges that we’ve had personally has been to come up with a definition that is both clear and simple and that provides a useful framework for follow-on discussions related to “Okay, so now what do we do?”

(Sidenote: At the time of writing this, searching Google on the term “Web 2.0″ yields roughly 406 million references. A number of these references have influenced our thinking over the past 18 months including the initial and follow-up entries by Tim O’Reilly as well as “Web 2.0: A Pattern Library” by Tim Ziegler published on March 21, 2006 on Webmonkey which like O’Reilly’s original article presented the idea of examining Web 2.0 from a pattern perspective.)

Given that, I thought it might be useful (and fun?) to quickly share some of our more current thinking related to how we are defining Web 2.0 is and what it is all about.

Read the rest of this entry »

If there is one gadget that I think I’m pretty excited about, it’s the Sony Reader which is Sony’s new e-book device. It’s been announced for a while now and is scheduled to be available shortly (late summer to early autumn). From the things that I have read, I think this device has the potential to transform the publishing industry like the iPod has changed the music industry.

What’s so cool about this device (as opposed to other e-books)? Well, first, it uses a new type of display technology - Gizmodo calls “amazing (and amazingly readable).” It also appears to have a really good battery life and you can expand the memory to carry a lot of material. But most exciting is that you can use it with not only the (I’m guessing) Sony eBook format, but also PDFs, RSS (with images), JPEGs and “personal documents” (whatever that means - maybe word, html or text documents). Also, from the images, the design itself looks pretty slick as well.

As a general rule, I pretty much think that anything that allows me to take stuff out of and reduce the weight of my shoulder bag is a good thing. Typically, I carry a two or three magazines and a book when I travel. Also, I typically read a couple of books at a time…so this looks like it may allow me to take some stuff out of my bag and have access to a lot of the content that I want at the same time.

Oooooh! I’m getting the shivers just thinking about it.