Web/Tech: March 2004 Archives

Joi Ito blogs about Microsoft's Linda Stone's concept of continuous partial attention and, I think, misses the point. The constant din of information requires that we disconnect sometimes and actually think about a topic; not continuously shot from the hip. I don't think we can process any more quickly than we do. Continuous partial attention is not an answer. In fact Linda Stone goes on to say in the article in INC., that: "It's crucial for CEOs to be intentional about breaking free from continuous partial attention in order to get their bearings. Some of today's business books suggest that speed is the answer to today's business challenges. Pausing to reflect, focus, think a problem through; and then taking steady steps forward in an intentional direction is really the key."

Wet talked last night with Linda Stone about her idea of continuous partial attention. She says it is different from multi-tasking.

Linda Stone

From Inc.com

It's not the same as multitasking; that's about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we're scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon: "How can I tune in in a way that helps me sync up with the most interesting, or important, opportunity?

This is really relevant to some of the thoughts I've been having about the UI of mobile devices and how they fade in and out of your attention rather than being on or off like computer screens. Yes, you do this a bit with computers, but not nearly as seamlessly as mobile phones are integrated in the real world by advanced users.

Also, the IRC back channel at conferences or the multi-modal distance learning projects where you have a video of the speaker, the power point presentation, the chat, the wiki and the back channel going at the same time. It CAN be very overwhelming, but I think it's because we are conditioned to think that we need to understand all of the information that is being transmitted.

I think an interesting metaphor might be the difference between loss-less and lossy compression technology. There is so much information being transmitted and it doesn't matter if you everything exactly (or if you are getting exactly the same bits as someone else). You can glean from the fire-hose in the mode that makes the most sense for you. The trick is to get a picture of what is going on from a perspective that makes sense for you in a format that compresses well for you. I think that if we stop trying to "catch it all" which we are conditioned to do, and think more in terms of lossy compression and surfing parallel streams and multi-modes, maybe it is easier.

Also, we discussed last night now human brains are adapting to these changes and how probably younger generations will continue to grow up differently and interfaces and modes will adapt again to this new generation. This has a lot to do with the discussion on ADD.

Good entry in Smartmobs with more links.

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[Joi Ito's Web]

I have been interested in this for some time, since I use Sharepoint for collaboration purposes in my business. The template that has been created looks great, although it took quite a bit of time and effort to get it right.

Recently I've had a couple of questions from readers asking about the possibility of using SharePoint for blogging.  These questions have been sitting in my “Research as a possible blog topic someday when I have the time” folder, waiting for a spare moment.  Then today I received an email/comment from Sig Weber pointing me to his SharePoint Blog.  To be clear, Sig's created a blog that's done in SharePoint, which contains lots of good content including posts about his progress, trials and tribulations in using SharePoint as a blogging tool.  (Note: If you get a permissions error, you should be able to go past it -- as Sig points out in his blog, it's a work in progress :)  So check out Sig Weber's Playground (aka. "Extreme SharePoint'ing" or: doing more with less) blog, especially if you're interested in evaluating SharePoint as a blogging tool.

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[LauraJ's Weblog]

Shinkuro is a research and development company with a strong interest in information sharing across organizational boundaries. The company has a beta app that is available for testing. Some say it may be a bit like groove. Use the Shinkuro software to securely share files across enterprise boundaries - securely. Just install the software on each machine, create a group and designate a folder you would like to share with the group. Any files you put in that folder will be shared with the other members automatically.

In my first unsuccessful attempt to get a VoIP phone and service to work on my computer, I tried Voiceglo. Voiceglo was in the news lately because they received a huge infusion of venture capital funding. The Voiceglo application, called Phoneglo, got memory errors on my machine, so I quickly gave up. Xten and Addaline worked better for me and Xten operates in a Mac environment too.

I was inspired by SKYPE, a service that allows you to talk with other SKYPE users for free, to seek out an internet softphone and service offering that would allow me to use my computer to dial to any phone. I discovered it is possible! First, I wanted a softphone application that would allow me to talk to friends on a Macintosh platform for free via VoIP. The soft phone I found is called Xten which can be downloaded for free. On the Xten site, it lists several service providers that sell access to the public telephone network. I choose Addaline. It took me a while to configure it properly, but when I did it works better than I expected! The sound is very clear and the connection is as fast as a public telephone connection. I can already feel my phone bills falling! I still will use SKYPE, but when I want to call regular phone numbers, I will definitely use Addaline and my new Xten softphone.

BTW, the President of Xten has a blog called SIPthat.com. This blog provides a running commentary on VoIP, SIP, and IP communications.

Windows Sharepoint Services needs better documentation. Encountering problems frequently requires posting to a newsgroup or surfing to find an answer. The WSS FAQ by Mike Walsh is a great resource for answers on all dimensions of the application. He really knows his stuff!

I am doing research on elearning, open courseware, course management, learning object repositories and learning management platform. I have searched Feedster, read blogs, and I am finding a very rich community of bloggers and businesses that document elearning. I thought I would try to list the sites here:

Autounfocus
D'Arcy Norman
eLearning Entrepreneur
elearningspace
ICTolgy
Kathleen's Blog
OLDaily
The Learned Man
Online Learning
Update
eLearn Magazine
Learning Circuits
Learnativity.com
Viral-Learning
Peter on eLearning
e-Learning Centre

...More to come!

I have been trying to get someone at SocialText to pay attention to my request to try their wiki application, but customer service in this growing company appears to be poor. After a lot of research I find myself enthusiastic about the simplicity of wikis and I want to try it out with a current team. SocialText has built a platform that makes wiki creation quite easy, I understand.

Stowe Boyd has written an interesting article: Wicked (Good) Wiki which examines collaborative work and introduces how wiki's work.

I am a big fan of groove. I am looking forward to the update.

The Groove Website offers more information on the upcoming release of Groove 3.0. Existing customers can also sign up for the Groove 3.0 Beta.

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[Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]