KnowledgeForward

I’ve noticed a steady uptick in articles about gaming from a business point of view.   Many of them like comparing the economic models in the gaming world and real world.  An example is a Ross Mayfield blog posting about gaming called The World Wide World:

Joi first for me and most naturally realized that MMORGs don’t adapt to the real world enough. The business is still perceived as a content business with a captive audience. Where users are not content generators, but accumulators. SL, to Philip Rosendale’s credit, breaks this mold where content is pre-dominantly generated by users. It also breaks the mold of embracing an open economy with other economies. But how much of the mold is broken?

As anyone who read my “5 things” posting knows, I have a background in the gaming industry so I still follow it with interest.  I have noted 3 aspects to how games apply to business (other than gaming as a business of course):

1. Games as marketing. This subdivides into marketing with games (making your b2c website more interesting and sticky with free games) and marketing in games (e.g., selling billboard space in a racing game)
2. Serious games. Overlapping categories of “game theory” , “simulation”, and “fun learning”. Examples include competitive simulations (like lemonade stand as a lesson in supply/demand based pricing) and military scenario testing
3. Lessons from gaming. This starts with the assumption that games are often highly developed and well ahead of business apps in certain technologies (virtual reality, user interface, communication, collaboration, use of video/audio, interactivity and responsiveness). To paraphrase what I once told a peer that was needling me about pulling corporate UI ideas from the gaming world “The fact that users are paid to or have to use business applications is often a crutch that leads to poor design. There is a lot to be learned from an environment where people actually have to pay the developer to use their programs rather than the other way around”. (Actually, I was a bit more blunt: When he asked why he should listen to my UI idea given its source in the games I used to write, I said “Because people pay me to use my programs. We have to pay them to use yours.”)

Alec Saunders (CEO of iotum) posted out a wonderful visionary piece on presence called “New Presence” and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto. It does a good job of pointing out the potential of presence, the set of data and sensors it needs to have to function, and the need to somehow break up what he calls the “walled gardens” that independent presence systems have today.

I’d like elaborate on some of the comments I posted to his blog entry and to relate his vision of presence to the Rich Presence model I introduced in my telebriefing “Stop Interrupting Me! Effects of Communication on Info-stress and Attention Fatigue” (conceptual model posted up here). Incidentally, I still like my term “rich presence” better as it implied more functional rather than just ‘new and different”.

When the Voice 2.0 Manifesto was written, it identified presence as the enabler of conversation, allowing parties to easily determine each others willingness to engage, and by which technology.

Lord knows I have way too many conversations and would have way more if my spam filter wasn’t working and I didn’t have caller ID.It’s the quality of the conversations that is the issue. I want presence to enable higher quality conversations that are more relevant and important to me. In essence, presence is one of the key enablers of attention management.

Alec posts up a good diagram of all the profile, context, and relationship data involved in his future vision of presence, similar to the “data” and “sensors” on my conceptual architecture but his has some great additional detail.But from his description I am wondering where the brains are in his model.Where does the information get crunched for a particular message coming in? In my conceptual model of an attention management system I define an “attention response engine” with Rich Presence, Rules & Scoring, and Channel Switching & Routing components. Deciding where presence stops and the decision making kicks in has been a matter of debate between myself and Mike Gotta.

Alec has a good listing of new applications that rich presence would enable, but I believe presence must be valuable to end users, not the vendors. If the end users don’t get enough out of it, the vendors will be left high and dry. Per my pushing/pulling definition of “attentional technologies and capabilities”, the issue for end users is: does this quiet my life, pushing back noise and pulling the messages most important to me in my current state forward?

…the simple confusion around protocol standards. Ironically, this ought to be the simplest piece to solve. Standards are simply codified ways to describe information. The tussle between SIP / SIMPLE, and XMPP must be resolved before New Presence can effectively move forward.

I think there are a lot more standards needed than simply resolving SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP. Standards on how roles and relationships are defined, interests, rules and scoring, preferences must all be defined. XMPP is extensible, but that doesn’t mean it defines these extensions.

These are not criticisms, just adjustments to a visionary piece. I think we are both thinking in the same direction. My hope is that a solid enough vision of presence can be created to encourage vendors to actually move forward with something easy to use and, while not perfect, a lot better than we have today.

Below is the Attention Management System Conceptual Architecture that I presented at my telebriefing on Enterprise Attention Management earlier this month.

I don’t normally blog comics, but when one has to do with attention I can’t help it. Alerting, pulling messages forward, use of multi-channel communication to escalate important messages, the futility of attention management with clueless people … it’s all here:

Bizarre …we now have malware so malicious that it actually runs an anti-virus program on your PC to kill other malware before taking over your computer? I guess that as long as the other malware on your PC is more malicious or you have multiple viruses this could be a net benefit?  If viruses all attack each other before they can hurt us this could be like a movie where the victim sneaks out while two sets of bad guys fight over who gets to kill him.
From Larry Seltzer in eWeek:

It was SecureWorks that spread the word that SpamThru had made the leap of sophistication of downloading and installing a hacked version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus in order to keep the system for itself and remove other malware.

After being immersed in the blogosphere for a while (reading and recently writing) and the analyst biz since 1998 I’ve become accustomed to pithiness. By pithiness I mean the desire to coin a phrase, be the first to “2.0″ something, make a name for yourself by originating a meme. I hadn’t noticed how far this had gone until I watched Henry Kissinger on Charlie Rose yesterday.

Henry Kissinger represents the opposite of this desire. He was very unquotable and unpithy. For example, when talking about sectarian conflict in Iraq, Charlie asked “So, is this a civil war?” A budding pundit (read the Wall St. Journal article on the up-and-coming 2nd tier pundits and their strategies for getting on talk shows - terrible!) would have jumped on that with a clear yes or no and a pat soundbite on why. Mr. Kissinger slowly considers what he will say, then proceeds with a sentence that doesn’t begin with yes or no. I didn’t totally agree, but that’s not my point here. It’s that to me, he wasn’t just being shifty - his explanation was detailed and well reasoned, but more focused on getting the ideas out than the soundbite that will get him quoted or put him in a list of people for/against something. It represents a high degree of self-confidence.  He doesn’t need to make an extreme statement, coin a phrase, or act as spokesman for a popular point of view to feel important and connected. People will continue to listen to him because of what he has to say, not how he says it.

This made me consider where I stand on punditry. As an industry analyst my job involves a certain degree of pithiness. My profession lends itself to stating that “___ is dead” or adding “2.0″ to the end of things along with a list of what makes it 2.0-worthy.  But, like Chris Saad stated in Web 3.0 - Are you serious? I’m also tired of the versioning of the web.

But in fair disclosure, I’ve often been guilty of coining my own terms and looking for concise, catchy ways to say things that often clobber some nuance in the process. In my defense, I try to coin terms as a shortcut to understanding rather than to get them picked up by press and vendors (”Enterprise Portal Framework” as an example). And as for the catchy phrases lacking in nuance, it’s an unfortunate fact that most people give you only the proverbial elevator ride to get your point across. And I quickly acknowledge the nuance and counter-arguments immediately after the statement (if they get off the elevator with me). At META Group we were taught to make an extreme statement, then back off 10% to make a point. That way people clearly know where you are coming from, you get their attention, and then you can acknowledge the nuance. Some abused this, going way farther than 10% or even ignoring it.

In any case, if I required the patience from my audience that it takes to listen to Henry Kissinger (I’ve heard Mr. Kissinger speak in person as well and the word “dynamic” would not be the best desciption) I may as well start washing cars for a living. I plan to continue practicing safe punditry by helping my readers quickly grasp what I’m saying and where I’m coming from and acknowledging the clarifications, special cases, and counter-arguments that need to be addressed to the best of my ability.

I read an interesting entry on the Gilbane Technology CTO blog called “XML and Office 2.0“. I recommend it as a good posting about all the “new web” stuff being applied to Office, but I thought it went a bit far in a few areas.

I posted the following response:

You’re right about the unbridled enthusiasm making this possible - wiki versions of Office apps are really scratching an itch that has been there for a long time. I don’t buy that it is now possible due to new technologies though - AJAX and RSS are actually not that new. It’s more due to the emergence and acceptance of wikis as a concept and rich internet application programming models.

Offline and disconnected usage is a wrench in the works here. I don’t want to have to wait until internet access is widely and cheaply available on planes just to work on a report while flying. And a mobile lifestyle leads to an occasionally connected lifestyle as well.

BTW - I have a number of problems with the “Office 2.0″ moniker, not least being that we have already had Office 3.0 (it came out in August of 1992: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office). The “2.0″ tag looks funny when applied to versioned software.

If you haven’t seen the Times Reader and are interested in news readers you should take a look at it.  (Note: You’ll need .NET 3.0.)

There are several good ideas in here that result in a very readable experience.  I like the leverage they get out of the metatagged content, such as a “pictures in the news” view (which does a slideshow of the pictures from each article but hyperlinks to the text if you click to learn more about the picture), a custom-assembled page around a metatag, and the “all navigation” view that shows each section of the paper with light/dark grey boxes.  That last features allows the reader to see at a glance which stories they didn’t get to and hover over them for a quick preview.

I found the font very readable and the full screen view allowed me to focus on just the paper and not distracting OS menus and browser interface buttons.

Still, there are a few issues:

• No personalization
• No community
• An insular content experience (pure NY Times content with only a search to external content) unlike the doomed Encyclopedia Britannica which provided its own content in context with other content
• Some random bugs in the interface and syncing

All in all, a good view into a forward-looking news reader.

Great unintentionally humorous quote from the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK (Revised: September 2006):

All object model changes in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 have been made with an emphasis on high backward compatibility with .[sic] So even though you may have a completely re-factored area of the object model, such as Administration, your code should still work going forward. However, you should be aware that your old code, although functional, may not do what you expect in the new object-model hierarchy.

Only an a real engineer could have written that! “It works perfectly! The fact that it doesn’t do what you expect is your problem …”

If you’re like me, you seek out dissenting opinions on social reviewing sites like IMDB and Amazon to supplement the glowing ones. So, I looked at reviews for the book “The Attention Economy” by Davenport and Beck. I scrolled past the positive reviews you’ll find for most well-written management books to see what else was out there and one commentary was especially interesting. I found it at the bottom of the page:

Disappointingly fluffy January 6, 2003
12 out of 17 found this review helpful

… The initial bad direction comes in the form of a broken definition of attention: the authors claim attention is a narrowing of perception (sensory input), followed by an action decision. The latter part of this is completely bogus from a psychological perspective, and only there to support the marketing/advertising-oriented slant of the book. Yes, attention does involve a focus on a subset of sensory input, but no decision making needs to be attached. Think of watching a movie: it has your full attention; you’re blocking out surrounding stimuli to some extent. But when the movie is effective, you’re along for the ride, not making decisions. Furthermore, the authors *claim* that attention-management is different from time-management, but are very sloppy in distinguishing between attention, time, mind share, effort, persuasion, and a variety of other measures. It’s maddening.

While I am also a strong proponent that adding action to the definition of attention leads down a slippery slope, I’ll leave that for a future posting. What I want to note here is the part I italicized which summarizes a tricky issue when talking about attention: does time equal attention?

The confusion exists because time is often a good proxy for attention. Spending time reading to your child is also giving your child attention. And it would be hard to argue to your boss that you gave a failed project the attention it deserved if you never spent any time on it. But, it’s easy to come up with examples where time doesn’t equal attention. Many boring lectures I slept through in college are proof enough for me.

On the other hand, when you start giving advice about how to bring attention to important messages, shield attention, or manage attention you often find yourself talking about time.  For example, “Set aside time each day to read e-mail”. This doesn’t mean the author has forgotten that time and attention are not equal.  Just that in this case giving time is giving attention.

This comment is important to keep in the back of the mind though since it’s too easy to get sloppy about equating time and attention. I believe that attention needs to be considered as a physiological and psychological phenomenon first with other proxies such as time and action being secondary for the purpose of improving one’s efficiency and decreasing info-stress and attention fatigue.