Ed Batista

Cool Tools

I've been able to spend a little time recently digging into some social media tools to understand how they work as well as their potential value for someone like me, i.e. an executive coach and change management consultant with an abiding interest in technology.  So here's a quick rundown:

Utterz is an extremely user-friendly service that allows you to capture and publish audio, video, pictures and text.  The site essentially creates a link between your phone, your camera or your webcam and the web at large.  You can call Utterz and use your phone to record an interview, snap a picture while you're at it, and publish the audio and the video not only to your Utterz page but also to just about any other site you designate on the fly--the audio's captured immediately, and you simply text the photo to Utterz.  You can do the same with video, but if you're like me, A) your phone's OK for stills but terrible for video, and B) uploading video via your carrier sucks up too much time and bandwidth.  No problem--just use your laptop's webcam and send the stream directly to Utterz, or upload a previously recorded video file.  (You can also opt to send all your Utterz videos to your YouTube account simultaneously.)  I see Utterz as a way to turn any conversation into an interview you can share with colleagues AND as a personal podcast for friends and family (depending on where I choose to send the files.) Very cool and stone cold simple.  Many thanks to my old--well, let's say former--colleague Holly Ross for the inspiration.

Tumblr is sort of like Utterz but a bit more lightweight, which makes it both easier to use and slightly less useful--or, rather, useful in a different way.  It's another service that allows you to capture and publish links, text, and photos, and although it doesn't have built-in support for audio and video, it's really easy (especially via their Firefox bookmark button) to publish to your Tumblr page and to anyplace you can insert a little code.  I see it as a great way to share and promote links to articles, posts and photos that don't merit a full-on blog post but merit something more prominent than a del.icio.us tag.  Many thanks to Mark McGuinness for the (continued) inspiration--he's THE most tech-savvy executive coach I've met since I stopped working in technology to launch my coaching practice, and I learn something every time I stop by his site.

And now for something completely different: Don't Break the Chain is a fun site supposedly inspired by the motivational wisdom of Jerry Seinfeld, according to Brad Isaac:

[Seinfeld] told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

True?  Who cares.  It's a great story that translates brilliantly into a free web service.  Your "Chain" account serves as the online equivalent of Seinfeld's big wall calendar, and you use it to "X" out days on which you accomplish your given task.  (The image above indicates that I've gone running three straight days--no mean feat this past year.)  You can create multiple calendars to track different goals, you can customize the display a bit, and if you want the world to help hold you accountable, you can copy-and-paste a little code to publish your calendar anywhere you'd like.

Twitter is a service that's clearly useful for many people..but not me--at least not right now.  If Utterz makes it easier to blog audio and video, and if Tumblr allows you to turn your tags into a mini-blog, then Twitter is a sort of micro-blog, allowing you to send out even more ephemeral messages (up to 140 characters) via your phone or the web to your personal Twitter network.  The How? isn't an issue here--if you've used IM or sent a text message, you know how to use Twitter, but the Why? (or Why not?, in my case) is more complex.  I signed up for a Twitter account months ago, but it's never seemed useful to me.  This is primarily because my work as an executive coach involves a lot of face-to-face interactions that can't be interrupted, and my time online (or text-accessible) is limited as a result.  But I'm also aware that I need a certain amount of distance between the world and myself in order to think, to focus, to stay grounded.  I understand the appeal of feeling more connected with the people in my network via a steady stream of Twitter updates, and I could see myself using Twitter if others on my team did as well, because although most of our work with clients and students is face-to-face, we often work from separate locations--but until that happens, I'm content to opt out.  (See Common Craft's typically well-done Twitter in Plain English if you'd like to learn more.)  UPDATE: One day later, John Unger posts a Twitter manifesto, describing how he uses it--and he notes that his initial response was "Why the hell would I want to do that?"  It didn't change my mind about Twitter's utility to me at the moment, but it did open my eyes to the creative ways people are adapting the service to meet their needs.  UPDATE 2: OK, I give--with Mark McGuinness weighing in as well, I'll see if Twitter can add value despite my unusual schedule.

Finally, even though the services rendered by Creative Commons are nothing like those described above (and even though I've been a CC user for years), my work on this post led me to realize that my CC license was out-of-date, and this seems like a good opportunity to point anyone unfamiliar with them in a helpful direction.  CC provides an alternative to copyright that allows people like me to share our writing, our photos, and any other type of content with the world under the restrictions of our choice.  For example, everything I post on this site is published under CC's "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States" license, which means that you're free to copy, distribute and/or remix my work as long as you also 1) attribute it to me by linking to this site and 2) further distribute any remixed works under a similar license.  Almost all of the photos I use in my posts (including the one above) have been published under the same CC license as mine, and I'm both grateful for the right to access such highly creative work and hopeful that my contributions are as useful to someone else.

Photo by Paul Schultz.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Who Am I? You Tell Me

Go ahead and edit my WikiBio.  Or set up your own and ask me to edit yours.  What's the catch?  You can't edit the contents of your own bio--only other people can.  (You can roll it back to previous versions if someone writes something you disagree with, and you can ban troublesome IP addresses.)

Sure, there's a degree of silly narcissism involved in this, but at a deeper level it's a potentially powerful reputation system.  You may not believe what I say about myself, but perhaps you'll believe what others are saying about me.

tags: wikibio

My Attention Data at Work

Attention data, simply enough, is any data that reflects what you're paying attention to.  Although I'm writing less frequently about technology on this site these days, I just can't help it on occasion, and the two attention-data-powered widgets below are cases in point.  The first one is a list of the most popular websites in my "clickstream," my personal browsing history.  The data is captured using my Attention Recorder, an open source extension for the Firefox browser, shared with an account I've opened at Root Markets, my Root Vault, and displayed here via a little code embedded in this post.  (Disclosure: I'm the Executive Director of AttentionTrust, the nonprofit that distributes the Recorder, and AttentionTrust was co-founded by Seth Goldstein, CEO of Root.)

I've also embedded the code in the in the right-hand sidebar, just below I'm Listening To..., which is a list of the musical artists I've listened to most frequently over the past week.

The same principle's at work here--the data about the songs I play in iTunes is captured using a plugin from Last.fm, shared with my Last profile, and displayed here via some code provided by Last.

OK, so what?  Well, this is interesting to me for any number of reasons: It's a way for me to express myself, to voice my preferences for certain websites and certain musical artists, without requiring any action on my part other than going about my daily business.  I visit sites, I play music, and that data is automatically captured, shared and published.

It's also noteworthy that this is behavioral data (i.e. the sites I actually visit, and the music I actually listen to), not articulated data (i.e. the sites I say I visit, and the music I say I like.)  It's honest; it's real.

And it's the foundation for an ecosystem--an "attention economy"--within which people are capturing and exchanging their attention data with each other, driving a whole host of personalized discovery and recommendation systems.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy root+vaults last.fm

Michael Goldhaber on "The Value of Openness in an Attention Economy"

Over the the course of 2006 I've been writing fewer posts about technology (blogging and dead laptops excepted) and more about management and leadership.  That's partly because I've been writing more intensively about technology on my "day blog" at AttentionTrust, the nonprofit where I serve as Executive Director.  But it's primarily because technology has always been just a means to an end for me--I only started caring about it in the mid-'90s, when I saw how it would help the social services organization where I worked be more effective and more efficient.

What's far more important to me than technology is helping people fulfill their potential (starting with myself.)  I firmly believe that technology can play an important role in that process, but looking toward the future, I'm increasingly interested in such disciplines as executive coaching and organizational development.  (If I hadn't settled into nonprofit management after college, I might have gone back to grad school to become a psychologist like my dad, but somehow I would up with an MBA.)

Given all that, I'm thrilled when I come across concepts that bridge my vocational focus on technology and my avocational interest in personal development.  So this morning I'd like to touch on a topic that springs from my technology-related work at AttentionTrust but ultimately transcends technology entirely and speaks to such issues as how we relate to each other as individuals, how we relate to the world at large, and even the underpinnings of our social and economic structures.

To provide some background: AttentionTrust's mission is to educate people about the existence of "attention data," (i.e. the various types of digital records that reflect what we pay attention to [and what we ignore], and in turn serve as the fundamental basis for determining value in our information-based economy), and to subsequently empower people to exert control over and make effective use of their attention data, thereby becoming active participants in the emerging "attention economy."

One of the intellectual forefathers of the concepts that underlie our work is Michael Goldhaber, an incredibly thoughtful and gracious man whom I've had the pleasure of getting to know over the past year.  Michael just posted "The Value of Openness in an Information Based Economy" (PDF, 198 KB), a paper he delivered last month at First Monday's "FM10 Openness: Code, Science and Content" event.  I posted the following excerpts from Michael's paper on AttentionTrust's site, and I'm re-posting them here because I think they have some significant implications for how organizations and individuals define and obtain success.  (More on that in future posts.)  Please note that I've invented the headings--they're not in Michael's original paper:

What's Your Audio Brand?

When there are too many books and blogs to read, too many movies to see, and--most importantly--too much music to listen to, a question of fundamental importance is "How do I find the good stuff--the writing and video and music--the content--that's going to be relevant and interesting to me?"  A lot of smart people are grappling with this problem, and at least a few of them work at Muzak.  And don't think "elevator music" when you hear that name--that's so 20th century.  Think "audio branding."

As David Owen's article in the April 10th issue of The New Yorker makes clear, Muzak is doing some very advanced thinking about matching people--and companies, for that matter--with relevant content:

Last March, at a trade show in Las Vegas, Muzak demonstrated audio branding on a large scale. The company’s simple rectangular booth had a decorative theme for each of the show’s three days: a red rose, a Martini, and an eight ball from a pool table. Dana McKelvey had designed a soundtrack for each day that was meant to evoke the theme musically. While the songs played—Etta James and Diana Krall for the rose, Frank Sinatra and dZihan & Kamien for the Martini, Blondie and Wilson Pickett for the eight ball—audio architects interviewed visitors, and used their answers to come up with a “personal audio imaging profile” for each one; later, back in Fort Mill, the audio architects used those profiles to create personalized CDs.

I went through the same imaging process during my visit to Fort Mill. Steven Pilker, a twenty-five-year-old audio architect—he had worked in a record store while in school at U.N.C. Charlotte and, when he graduated, was offered a job by a Muzak executive who had been a regular customer—asked me seven or eight questions, none of which had anything to do with music. (“When you’re not working, what do you like to do?” “If you could choose an actor / actress to star in your biographical movie, who would it be and why?”) A couple of weeks later, he sent me a six-song program, which contained nothing connected to what I think of as my main musical phenotype (“classic rock”); in fact, five of the six tracks were by artists I’d never heard of. Yet I liked all six very much, and later bought CDs by two of them (Sufjan Stevens and Jamie Lidell). Pilker’s selections aren’t definitive, of course; another audio architect surely could have had another take on my “brand.” But I was struck that Pilker, after spending very little time with me, had created an appealing musical program that was based on his sense of who I was, rather than on any direct examination of the music I actually listened to if left on my own.

This is really one of the promises of attention: Aggregating our interests and preferences and applying the right algorithms to that data in such a way that we can find the good stuff (and avoid the crap) on the basis of what we pay attention to (and what we ignore).  And it's not just (or even primarily) about efficiency--it's about discovery, it's about broadening our horizons, it's about a richer life.

(By the way, if you like the Owens piece, check out Barbara Hagenbaugh's USA Today article, which covered much the same ground 18 months ago.  I do believe Owens owes Hagenbaugh a debt of gratitude, to say the least.)

At PC Forum

Just a note to let folks know that I'm blogging from PC Forum, pimping AttentionTrust among the Masters of the Universe.  It's been a fascinating day-and-a-half so far, and you can keep up with me at the AttentionTrust blog.

tag: pcforum attentiontrust

I'm an Attention Pimp

According to Valleywag.  I suppose it's better than being an "attention whore," but it's the same business in the end.

Are You (Meta)Experienced?

Even non-geeks like me are increasingly aware of and involved with our personal metadata.  The personal metadata I interact with most frequently is the information I share with Last.fm derived from the music I play on this laptop.  For the unitiated, anytime I play a song on iTunes (or stream a song from Last on their player), the song title, artist, and album information is uploaded to my Last profile.  The system also notes when a particular song was played and how often I play it.  All of this metadata is compiled by Last, and most of it is made available in a series of charts on their site, as well as via the Audioscrobbler Web Services API (for examples of the latter, here are my Top 50 Artists in plain text and XML.  Put that in your aggregator and smoke it.)

I'm focusing on Last because it's such a great example of what happens when user-friendly systems make it easy for us to record, store and analyze our metadata: We have meta-experiences.

Just as metadata is "data about data," a meta-experience is "an experience about an experience."  When I look at my Last charts, I'm having a meta-experience; the experience of comprehending and assessing that information is derived from a previous (or concurrent) experience--in this case, listening to a song.

And as systems like Last proliferate (and they will), and we're able to capture more and more of our personal metadata, our meta-experiences will become more explicit and meaningful to us.  We'll be more conscious of the presence (or absence) of the meta-experience at the moment of experience.

I notice this now when I'm playing music on a device other than this laptop--an iPod or my car stereo, if I'm out of the house, or the CD player hooked up to my stereo if the laptop's off and I don't feel like booting it up.  I'm oddly conscious of the fact that the music  isn't going anywhere but in my ear.  The metadata's simply disappearing, and I'm being deprived of a potential meta-experience.

Why do I care?  What impulses make my Last meta-experience (and potentially other meta-experiences) meaningful?  Meta-experiences document our experiences, and allow us to, well, experience them in entirely different ways.  They essentially add a whole new dimension to whatever we're doing.  For example, by sharing my musical metadata with Last, I have a much better understanding of which artists I listen to and when, and how those preferences can evolve over time.  I can exchange my metadata with other people through explicit and implicit gestures, both by inviting them (my "Friends"), as well as by letting Last match me with people whose tastes are similar to mine (my "Neighbors").

I could go on, but my point is simply this: Now that we've begun to capture and make use of our personal metadata, we're going to become increasingly conscious of the resulting meta-experiences.  And we're going to want more.  (Of course, all this has huge implications for the field of attention.)  More to come, I'm sure.

UPDATE: Putting theory into practice, here's a little graph of the number of songs I've played by the top 300 artists in my Last profile as of today.  (Look familiar?)  Congratulations--you are now  meta-experienced.

tags: attention attentiontrust last.fm metadata metaexperience meta-experience

Last.fm: One of Us, One of Us

Thanks to a great suggestion from friend and colleague Ruby Sinreich, I've started an AttentionTrust group over at Last.fm.  Here's my hastily-scribbled raison d'etre:

This is a group for Last.fm users who are interested in making more effective use of their "attention data" (including, but not limited to, all the data we're sharing with Last). We're big fans of Last, and we love their service, but we'd also love to know what Last is planning to do with this data. We hope this group will prompt some interesting discussions between Last and its users.

I really do love Last, and I hope the folks running it realize that eager, engaged, heavy-duty users like us make the best evangelists.

I also anted up and subscribed, figuring that $3 a month was a very cheap way to show my support for the best working attention service out there (and that's what they are, whether they realize it or not.)

I'm obviously a fan, but a few nagging questions remain: What's happening to all of that attention data?  Can I get a copy?  Can I manage it in any way?  Who else has access to it?  What will happen to it if Last tanks?  I have no idea--and that bothers me.  I'd love to see Last join AttentionTrust and give users the ability to exert more control over our data.  What about it, Last?

If you're not a Last user, here's the bullet: 1) It's a plugin that allows you to record your iTunes metadata (which songs you play and when, favorite songs and artists, etc.)  2) It's a web service that allows you to analyze your own metadata as well as others', matches you up with "neighbors" who share your musical tastes, and recommends music you'd like.  3) It's an online community that allows you to create groups with common interests, communicate with fellow members, and keep music-related journals.  You can use the basic service for free, and if you get addicted like me, you can opt for the paid service and get a few extra goodies.

And if you are a Last user, join the AttentionTrust group and become...one of us, one us.

UPDATE: Answering some of my own questions above...

• What's happening to all of that attention data?  Almost all of Last's data is available via the Audioscrobbler Web Services API.  (Audioscrobbler was the original name for the Last plugin.  The two entities merged under the Last name a while back, and the Audioscrobbler site now serves to support the Last development community.)  The data is available under Creative Commons' Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share-Alike License.  The data is also available for commercial purposes, but you have to contact rj@last.fm to obtain a separate license.  (There's no info available on the site about commercial licensing terms, or who's obtained them.)
• Can I get a copy?  Kinda sorta.  You and anyone else adhering to the terms of the CC license can grab a range of feeds in .txt, .xml and .xspf formats.  Some feeds are related to a specific user profile, and others are related to specific songs, artists, etc.  But you can't grab all of your user data--for example, you can only get the top 50 artists, albums and tracks from a user profile, not the full lists.
• Can I manage it in any way?  By this I meant, "Can I delete any shitty music I don't like anymore, so that it doesn't screw up my recommendations?"  The answer appears to be no.
• Who else has access to it?  Anyone who adheres to the CC license, and (I'm assuming) anyone who successfully negotiates a commercial license with Last.  I want to emphasize that for me at least, this is really about transparency, not privacy.  I assume that everything I do online is being tracked, recorded, analyzed and monetized by someone, and that's the price I pay to insure that my actions, my preferences, my interests are attributed to me.  It's a way of expressing myself, really.  Anonymity has its uses, and like everyone I have personal data that I want to keep private, but I'm not worried about keeping my Last data private.  But I would like to know more about who else has access, and under what terms, so that I can make an informed decision about using Last.
• What will happen to it if Last tanks?  Still no idea.  And this is a big concern of mine.  I've invested a lot of time and energy amassing attention data in Last's system, and it's become a valuable resource to me.  I'd feel a lot better if I were capturing and storing my data on my own (in an open, portable format, of course), and then opting to share it with Last.

tags: last.fm attention attentiontrust

Perpetually Suspended Communication

You're too damn busy.  You are, I am, we all are.  It's the contemporary condition.  Why?  One of the primary reasons is because we constantly open more loops than we close.  Call it perpetually suspended communication, a phrase coined by Adam Gopnik in his 2002 New Yorker article, "Bumping into Mr. Ravioli" (which you can find in The Best American Essays 2003):

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when bourgeois people were building the institutions of bourgeois life, they seem never to have complained that they were too busy--or, if they did, they left no record of it.  Samuel Pepys, who had a Navy to refloat and a burned London to rebuild, often uses the word "busy" but never complains of busyness.  For him, the word "busy" is a synonym for "happy," not for "stressed."

...Until sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, the normal affliction of the bourgeois was not busyness at all but its apparent opposite: boredom... Turn to the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, though, and suddenly everybody is busy, and everyone is complaining about it...

What changed? ...It was trains and telegrams.  The railroads ended isolation, and packed the metropolis with people whose work was defined by a complicated network of social obligations...

If the trains crowded our streets, the telegram crowded our minds.  It introduced something into the world which remains with us today: a whole new class of communications that are defined as incomplete in advance of their delivery. [emphasis mine]  A letter, though it may enjoin a response, is meant to be complete in itself... By contrast, it is in the nature of the telegram to be a skeletal version of another thing--a communication that opens more than it closes...

Every device that has evolved from the telegram shares the same character.  E-mails end with a suggestion for a phone call ("Anyway, let's meet and/or talk soon"), faxes with a request for an email, answering machine messages with a request for a fax.  All are devices of perpetually suspended communication.

Gopnik correctly locates the immediate source of the problem, but it's insufficient to simply blame the technology.  We get the technology we deserve.  And so many of our current modes of communication allow us to live in this state of perpetual suspension, of harried busyness, where closure and finality are the rarest of commodities.  But why?  I see a few reasons:

• There's value in keeping options open, and the rapid cycle times of these technologies make it easy to keep threads going almost indefinitely.  By avoiding decisive commitments in our communications, we remain poised to take advantage of any better opportunities that might come along.  We also wind up making the perfect the enemy of the good, to use one of my favorite phrases, and drive ourselves crazy chasing the elusive optimum value of everything.
  
• "Perpetually suspended communication" is closely related to continuous partial attention, coined by Linda Stone nearly a decade ago:

  With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.  Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities... We've been working to maximize opportunities and contacts in our life. So much social networking, so little time... Now we're over-stimulated, over-wound, unfulfilled.

  In this environment, it's difficult to devote much time to any one communique.  Thinking in sufficient depth to actually reach closure is a luxury we rarely have (or allow ourselves.)  So we hit the high points, take care of the most urgent business and move on, leaving much unfinished.

This isn't a rant against the pace of contemporary life, or advances in technology, or continuous partial attention (at least it's not meant to be.)  I can and do enjoy the benefits of all those things.  But just as it's futile to rail against them and pine for a simpler time, it's absurd to pretend that their benefits aren't accompanied by more baleful consequences.

I'm about to read Getting Things Done by David Allen, touted by, among many others, Merlin Mann of 43 Folders as one of the best approaches to increasing your personal productivity.  (And clearly the issues discussed above are among the primary reasons for the recent popularity of Allen and his fellow productivity gurus.)  If it's as good as advertised, perhaps I'll find some answers to the questions posed above.

More to come...

tags: perpetually suspended communication adam gopnik continuous partial attention linda stone getting things done gtd david allen