We've started a grand experiment. I mean a new blog - AttensaConnect.

Think of AttensaConnect as a central hub for tools, tips and techniques designed to help businesses get the most out of Web feeds at work. AttensaConnect combines dialogue with demonstration to give practical advice and access to RSS tools that can drive real innovation.

To kick things off the new blog uses the power of the "wisdom of the few" by aggregating the efforts of a growing team of experts, evangelists and authors with a passion for smart collaboration and fluid communication. The posts are authored by yours truly and our own Brian Mulvaney as well as some permanent guests with industry knowledge, Brooks Jordan of Sort Analytics, our own Brian Mulvaney and the co-founders of Feedia, John Hartman and Alex Williams. From time to time we'll invite other people with an interesting lens into RSS, and its use in the enterprise, to post.

Add AttensaConnect to your OPML file. Get to know the team, contribute and let's share the best actionable information about Web feeds at work.

Murphy's Law, like gravity is a force that's hard to overcome. We started experiencing weirdness with our email throughput on Monday, while our crack IT manager was on a well-deserved vacation exploring the jungles of Costa Rica. We were finally able to get in touch with him. He found an internet cafe, hijacked their router to connect his notebook and made everything right again. If you didn't get an email from Attensa with a download link use this one.

Click this link download Attensa for Outlook 2.0 directly. It's free.

Last week I attended the New New Internet Conference in McClean, Virginia. The conference featured TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee. Michael gave a hilarious and insightful overview of what separates the winners and losers in the Web 2.0 business arena. Andrew McAffee is credited with coining the term "Enterprise 2.0." If you are not reading his blog you should be. His whitepaper on Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration is essential reading.

Professor McAfee is a brilliant and engaging speaker who made me want to quit my job and go to Harvard (unlikely that they would have me). His talk included practical advice on how to introduce Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise by starting with collaboration tools. He also addressed the tension between structured systems and the open social network of Web 2.0 behind the firewall. A vice president of marketing I once worked for summarized this tension by saying, "Iron sharpens iron." It was his way of saying that the best decisions are reached and the greatest results occur when the strengths of two opposing forces are brought together for a common purpose. Forward thinking business and technology leaders who successfully integrate social networking tools with structured infrastructure will experience new heights of innovation.

To get to the New New Internet conference, I flew from the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum in Phoenix to Baltimore, expecting to arrive at midnight, giving me time to catch a few hours of sleep before setting up my demo station at 6:30 AM. Instead, because of a series of mechanical problems (a tear above the wing on the first plane and a leaking sink on the second, fixed with duct tape) I arrived in Baltimore at 3:00 AM, picked up my rental car and proceeded to drive around for two hours before finding my hotel. Was I lost? No, just bewildered. I talked the hotel manager down from a $300 room rate to $119. Took a $119 shower, shaved, suited up and headed to conference. I guess I'm gung ho for enterprise 2.0.

At 7:15 AM I demonstrated Attensa for Outlook and the Attensa Feed Server to a panel of judges including Jonathan Aberman of Amplifier Venture Partners , Phil Bronner of Novak Biddle, Charles Curran of Valhalla Partners, Karl Khoury of Columbia Partners and Tom Weithman of the Center for Innovative Technology.

Attensa was deemed to worthy of the title "Technology Pace Setter."

Here's what they had to say about us:
"Attensa - a world class RSS reader that solves the problem of synchronizing your feeds among multiple platforms, and also has shared intelligence technology, so that "group wisdom" can be applied to news feeds over an enterprise. You should check this application out I particularly liked the idea that within an enterprise a user could get a sense of which feeds were drawing the most attention."

On Wednesday we quietly refreshed our website and posted Attensa for Outlook 2.0. You can download the new version of Attensa for Outlook here. It's free.

We thought we'd come out of the 1.5 beta on roll so we jumped right to 2.0.

Unconventional? Perhaps. Decide for yourself. Here's our reasoning for the version leap.

Tens of thousands of enterprise business users have put Attensa for Outlook 1.5 to the test. This new version is built on top of the 1.5 code that has been enterprise hardened and meets the requirements of the most demanding IT pros for an RSS reader that means business.

Here's their short list - rock solid stability and minimal memory impact on Outlook performance, ease of deployment, advanced compatibility with the Microsoft RSS Platform, seamless synchronization and a feature set that covers the spectrum of use cases from reputation monitoring and management, gathering competitive intelligence, keeping up to speed on project collaboration, staying on top of rapidly critical corporate data, all without leaving Outlook.

What's new in 2.0

Deep connectivity with the Attensa Feed Server for seamless synchronization across Attensa for Outlook, the Attensa AJAX web reader and mobile devices and more meaningful attention analytics and reporting.

A mini player that lets users listen and watch audio and video content in Outlook, directly in the River of News. As more businesses take advantage of on demand video and audio to create and deliver specialized information, Attensa for Outlook let you choose how you want to consume rich media content. You can get instant access to the content using the new River of News player. Or, you can access the content when it is most convenient using the Attensa for Outlook Pod Catcher. The Pod Catcher automatically downloads audio and video attachments and puts them in a clearly labeled playlist in Windows Media Player or iTunes.

A desktop alert toaster keeps lets you track fast breaking business information whether you are working in Outlook or not. This Desktop Alert is smart. You can pick the feeds you want to be alerted to as soon as new information is available. When multiple feeds are updated, the alert box works the way you want it to work. It groups your alert notices so you can see at a glance when new information is available without being driven to distraction with constant interruptions.

Oh...and it's free. Did we mention that? We have made the move to a free download coupled with a premium support model. Premium support is $24.95 a year and gives you guaranteed response time to your issue and priority treatment. If you have purchased a previous version of Attensa for Outlook you are instantly covered with premium support.

Attensa is adding one more mind, and it's a big one, to our senior technical team.

Dr. Andreas Weigend, a driving force in the study of behavioral analytics, is joining Attensa's Board of Advisors. Andreas will collaborate with Eric Hayes, Attensa co-founder and VP of R&D, and our senior technical team to bring more deep math brain power to bear on the advancement of our search, recommendation, and discovery AttentionStream technology.

Entrepreneur, acadamic and masterful speaker, Andreas teaches Data Mining and E-Business at Stanford and was Amazon.com's full-time Chief Scientist. Over the last 20 years, he has published more than 100 scientific papers and worked with Yahoo, Match.com, Alibaba, and Goldman Sachs to show people the power of discovery in a connected world.

Getting to know Andreas is one of the pleasures of my life. Boundless enthusiasm, energy and creativity. Net-net, a true global citizen and an inspiring human being to hang out with.

You can extend your use of Attensa for Outlook 1.5 beta by downloading and running the latest installer.

You won't need all the extra time we built into it, however, because Attensa for Outlook 2.0 is right around the corner. We decided to make the jump straight to Attensa 2.0 because, along with improved performance as a result of the 1.5 group's feedback, we've got a couple of exciting new features that make Attensa an even more powerful tool for enterprise RSS: River of News Podcast Player and Desktop Alerts and more.

What will these new features mean to you?
No more switching to another application to consume podcasts/vodcasts.
No more switching to Outlook so you know when you have updates to your high-priority feeds.

Next week Attensa will be previewing a new version of Attensa for Outlook and the Attensa Feed Server at the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum in Scottsdale and at Dion Hinchcliffe's The New New Internet conference in McClean, Virginia. If you are attending these conferences and want to set up a meeting send me an email.

I've been using our new Attensa Feed Server, the server designed to dish out custom-packaged business web feeds, and I have to say I'm pretty excited about the future of this thing.

The user interface is deceptively simple, but the power that's behind it, and what makes it truly exciting, is its ability to package relevant feeds and deliver them to groups of people through a variety of interfaces.... that's not all the power, but that's the part that's captured my attention.

I've been managing a small group of users, and I get to specify one feed I want them to get... the rest of their feed consumption experience is completely under their own control. It's so simple that it took five minutes to learn my way around, a minute to set up my group, and it takes only a few seconds to add a new user each time I get one. It almost runs itself (from an administrator's point of view).

Now, I do have my wish list of features, and they have to do with querying the user database to easily find users and their Attention data. I also want some group management features, because although I manage only one group, others will be managing hundreds of groups and I like to play the "what if I had thousands of users and a hundred groups and was administering them locally on the server (like I am) instead of through active directory" game when I work with my group.

This is new, it's exciting, and features are being added at a fast pace. We're still discovering what they need to be. We're not following anyone, and there are no big road signs saying "follow this well-beaten path to building the ideal corporate feed server!" so we're working with companies who are ready for this technology, and we're building the road.

P.S. My boss did not make me write this, I just had to say something about our feed server!

We're excited about our Enterprise web feed solutions, and a new Attensa Feed Server will soon replace Attensa Online.

As a current Attensa Online user, you are eligible for a free account on our new Attensa Feed Server. That means you can have access to our Enterprise-level web feed solution, at no cost. It's the same server we're using for our own internal feed consumption.

All you need to do is submit a technical support issue, telling us what username you'd like to have set up (it doesn't have to be the same as your current Online username, but it can be).

Attensa Online will soon be decommissioned, but you'll have access for the next week to export your OPML file. You can import your feeds to Attensa Feed Server, including categories. You can manage your own password. With Attensa for Outlook 2.0, you'll be able to sync your feeds.

We have completed the integration of MoveableType Enterprise with Attensa.com. First we built the Attensa news section of the site on MTE. And now the Attensa blog has made the move from Typepad. In the words of Tony Maxymillion our crack Web developer "with only a few glitches, everything completed in a timely and relatively heartburn free manner. Migration couldn't have gone more smoothly."

The feed is the same so current subscribers won't miss a thing.