We announced the release of our current Attensa for Outlook version 2.0 a couple of days ago. Today we activated auto-update, so current users running versions lower than 2.0.1.29 will be prompted with the option to upgrade during the next 24 hours.

Here's the short list of improvements again:
1. Attensa now sends graphics to your blog service.
2. Improved category synchronization between the various Attensa components.
3. The River of News view now has icons to indicate whether an Attensa Feed Server feed is mandatory or not.
4. Improved playback in the River of News Pod Player.

Plus one more big one... the Firefox extension is now compatible with Firefox 2.0.

On Friday I gave the breakfast pitch at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. Here's a quick summary from Jason Preston on the Blog Business Summit site and here are the slides: Download file

"Scott Niesen, of Attensa, starts off the day with a presentation on the practical business applications of RSS, and RSS enterprise solutions. I've dropped my usual bullet-list of running thoughts below:

• The holy grail of marketing is getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
• The feed tools at Attensa, says Scott, are designed to use RSS feeds to get the right information to the right people instantaneously, without overloading them.
• There are stages of RSS in Business:

1. Blog posts and news headlines come in.
2. They start using them for business intelligence alerts.
3. Then they get circulated around with internal blogs and wikis.

• Then businesses get RSS-enabled enterprise systems to really harness RSS as a business tool. RSS readers allow you to access what is essentially an indispensable research tool, for example, monitoring RSS feeds from the blogosphere lets you do pretty intense brand monitoring, just by running a constant keyword search.
• Persistence & Subscription: RSS is an indispensable collaboration tool in its ability, in an internal blog for example, to make new developments available instantaneously of changes or updates. In short, a great way to track team projects.
• CEO blogging is a great way to build a shared vision - Attensa CEO keeps a private and a public blog, both of which help keep the company headed in the same direction.
• RSS connects to a ton of different data types that go beyond traditional blogs and wikis - they use RSS to deliver podcasts within the company.
• Sales force leads can be delivered to blackberries very conveniently with feeds. Good idea.
• RSS is a double-edged sword - old methods of getting information are not going away - so RSS is convenient, but it's also another possible way to get to information overload.
• The difficulty is creating a system whereby you get the news you want (or need) without getting overloaded with millions of feeds (anyone who uses an RSS reader knows how difficult this is).
• This is kind of cool: in the new Attensa reader, the feeds you look at most automatically rise to the top of your list. Kind of like the "most played" list in iTunes.
• When you're looking at enterprise RSS options, Scott has a list of 7 things to check, some of them:
  1. Is it easy to install & deploy?
  2. Access it anywhere? Offline, web & mobile?
  3. Synchronization - critical!
  4. LDAP integration and Exchange support (I don't know what that means...let me see if Wikipedia does...I'm guessing this one)
• Question: What's the smallest size company that this enterprise type solution is practical for? Scott says: well, a company of one can download the Attensa reader and get a lot of benefit about it. But for the more complex systems, they recommend you start around 100 employees."

Last week we released Attensa for Outlook 2.0.1.29. After using it for a week, I'm impressed with the small details. I know I work here and I'm supposed to like Attensa no matter what, but I really do love the way we're streamlining Attensa to keep up with the way I work. (My boss didn't make me write that.)

Here's what our team has put into this release:

1. More robust publishing. Attensa now sends graphics to your blog service.
2. They've cleaned up some issuse with how categories synchronize between the various Attensa parts... a big one for me is that Firefox has now forgotten my deleted categories, which used to hang around far too long.
3. The River of News view in Outlook continues to mature and integrate with our Attensa Feed Server, and now has icons to indicate whether a feed is mandatory or not.
4. The Outlook team has continues to tinker with the Pod Player, so playback has improved.

Since I remove and reinstall Attensa all the time, add and remove feeds for testing and in general do awful things to my computer in the interest of Science (like deleting data files while they're in use), I've noticed that this newest Attensa version recovers from the bad things I do, usually with just a simple restart of the Attensa Engine.

There's a lot to love about Attensa in the small details of how it works. It works the way I work.

I'll be talking about "Putting Web Feeds to Work" next Friday at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. Summit host Steve Brobeck, along with DL Byron, co-wrote our favorite book on business blogging: Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business.

Steve has a solid track record of organizing and producing high value conferences. It all starts Wednesday, October 25 with a pre-conference workshop to help people who are new to blogging get up to speed fast. He's lined up an impressive list of experts who will cover the latest tools and techniques for blogging, videoblogging,podcasting and measuring results. Check out the session schedule. Sign up and have some cantaloupe with me next Friday morning.

Crow is a dish best served cold with a marionberry coulis and a pinot noir from Domaine Drouhin. Twice on this blog I've popped off about how Attensa "don't need no stinking badges." ( here and here ). Well, apparently we do, but not for the reason you'd expect. Our toolbars for IE and Firefox work beautifully when it comes to automatically identifying feeds, letting you preview the content and adding the feed to Attensa for Outlook...thank you very much. They don't create the links to the Attensa website that drive search engine rankings. So, in the spirit of if you can't beat 'em, beat 'em in the long run, here is the Attensa chicklet.    

Our chicklet is smarter than the average chicklet. If you have Attensa for Outlook and click on the chiclet, it will act the way you want it to. It will bring up the feed preview window and let you decide if you want to add the feed to your subscriptions. If you click on the Attensa chicklet and you don't have Attensa for Outlook, it will take you to the Attensa for Outlook download link. Have I mentioned that Attensa for Outlook is free?

Look for Attensa chiclet coming soon to blogs near you.

You can get the Attensa chicklet for your feed here. 

It's funny how easy it is to take complete control for granted. It makes it very easy to forget there are many, many people working in corporations around the world who don't enjoy those same freedoms.

The Freedom to Load Your System with Spyware, The Freedom to Download Music and Games (often with Free Bonus Trojans), The Freedom to Seek Out and Destroy the Initialization Files for Company-Critical Software.

When we first released Attensa, it was designed to run in a system with no security constraints. Recognizing that Enterprise companies often don't work that way, we've made some significant improvements in how Attensa installs, with the goal of running smoothly in the corporate environment.

The feature benefits include:
Once an administrator installs Attensa, your users can set up and configure Attensa without admin rights.
Connection with Attensa Feed Server allows your company to push job-relevant information while providing additional control over security.
Companies can accommodate their job-share employees because Attensa now keeps track of settings for each Windows user.

We've got many more improvements on the way, but this one is pretty significant as security will continue to be at the top of the list for corporate software buyers.

P.S. my boss made me write this because it's good for me to interact with others.

I just found this great list of RSS applications on Steve Matthews' Vancouver Law Librarian Blog. It's focused on applications for law firms but, if you just change the word lawyer to "co-worker" and change the word client to "customer", these apps will work for any business.

1) Current Awareness - Surfing your favourite websites, newspapers & blogs is a waste of time. Smart firms & lawyers need to automate web content to come to them via RSS. These personalized collections can then be customized (through mixing and filtering) to only deliver the content that matches a lawyers' interests.

2) RSS for Firm Marketing - From blogs, to press releases, to firm newsletters and publications -- adding an additional delivery channel using RSS feeds is not a huge investment. And speaking from experience, those clients that do use it, will tell you how much they love it!

3) Vanity Feeds - Every time one of your lawyers, or the firm, gets mentioned in the news media or blogosphere, someone should be notified by RSS. Your firm's ability to use RSS could be the difference between finding out immediately or days later.

4) Internal Research Collections - Your library catalogue should offer an RSS feed for newly added materials that match your Lawyer's research interests. Same thing goes for internal KM & research collections. In the future, I expect Internal RSS will be as important to law firms as RSS is to bloggers today.

5) Client Press - Do your clients have their press releases RSS-enabled? Are you tracking your clients in the news media? What do you know about their latest products, disputes, and business initiatives? Knowing more about your client's business is always good for firm business.

6) Feeding on Marketing Content for KM - Do your firm members have blogs? contribute to an industry discussion forum? wikis? Are you feeding those public internet contributions back into your internal KM repositories? Something to think about.

7) Case Law & Legislative Changes - The importance of RSS notification for new & changing legislation cannot be underestimated. Nor can receiving the newest judgement just minutes after it has been published on a Court's website. In the future, searches on those websites will, via RSS, enable us to receive exactly the legislation and topical cases we desire. I also expect these applications may be coming sooner than most firms are anticipating.

8) Aggregated Tagging - Do your lawyers tag with a tool like Del.icio.us or Furl? (If they don't now, they might in the future, read on...) Tagging is the new 'favourites' or 'bookmarking' for online reading. Rather than creating a browser-based bookmark, these 'gems' are classified & kept in an online web collection, which just happens to be RSS-enabled! Does it not make sense to take those feeds, from multiple firm members, and aggregate them behind the firewall into a searchable repository? The line between public web-vs-behind the firewall collections is blurring. In the future, your KM efforts should be capturing firm members' public web contributions, and RSS technology will be right in the middle of that.

9) RSS Republishing - RSS helps to move web content to where it needs to be. We can automate the republication of any firm content -- from story headlines to full-text of publications -- to anywhere on a law firm's Intranet or public website. RSS is a very powerful website maintenance tool.

10) Feed Mixing & Filtering for Subject Collections - RSS should be easy for the end user, and starting from scratch building a personal feed collection doesn't always make sense. One new task I see for Law Librarians will be to create, remix and filter groups of feeds for different subjects. Creating & offering these pre-fab feed widgets that your lawyers can plug into their Aggregator could be a very valuable tool.

Attensa for Outlook can handle all of these applications - no problem. Persistent search, integrated tagging (that syncs with Del.icio.us, flexible feed and article organization tools are all built-in. Oh, and it's a free download.

There's a thought provoking and downright scary post on WebProNews - The Internet Will Eat You. It's a summary of a 115 page report from the Pew Institute report on the future of technology. The report conjures up a dark future where our privacy is relegated to the trash bin of history, a wave of cyber-addictions takes over our lives as virtual reality becomes more real than virtual, and machines take over. Isn't there a movie about this? At least, we can find some solace that we won't become fast food for a world run by evil robots.

Here are some spooky predictions from the futurists interviewed for the study.

"...it's not the corporation you need to worry about - it's the machines. Though most respondents agreed that humans will remain in control of technology until 2020, beyond that it's a toss up. As machines become more advanced, more self-aware, more independent, they could move beyond human control.

"Fear of enslavement by our creations is an old fear, and a literary tritism," said Paul Saffo, forecaster and director of The Institute for the Future. "But I fear something worse and much more likely - that sometime after 2020 our machines will become intelligent, evolve rapidly, and end up treating us as pets. We can at least take comfort that there is one worse fate - becoming food - that mercifully is highly unlikely."

Whoa pony. Everyone take a deep breath and come back to planet earth. We can't even return a phone call from voice mail when someone asks us to call back using a different phone number from the one they used to place the call. You have call out the number to yourself in a sing-song rhythm or the number is lost until you grind through your voice mail again. The computer power might come on strong in the next decades but we have a long way to go until the software makes robots hungry.

I'm catching up with my feeds as the train parallels the Columbia River. Cormorants, herons and gulls sit on the wing dams and piling remnants from the days the timber industry flourished. The train is terrific.

Reading articles offline with Attensa for Outlook is one of the real benefits of a dedicated feed reader compared to relying on a browser based reader.

This got my attention. Rod Boothy at Innovation Creators hits it just right with his post - Participation is the killer app.

"Whether it is end user participation in content driven conversations on blogs and wikis, or end user developed applications, mash-ups and widgets, I think that it is participation that key difference between Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise 1.0."

I'm writing this with Soundgarden playing on the iPod while I take the Amtrak Cascades train heading home to Portland from Seattle. (further proof, my life has a soundtrack). The silvery-gray and green of the Northwest land and skyscape streams by the window. Tukwila - Skookumchuk  - Tacoma - Tenino - Vadar - Kalama. They've got a knack for names in Washington.

The train beats flying and driving - hands down. There's a mysterious time warp continuum between Portland and Seattle. No matter how you travel - by car, by plane or train -  it takes exactly the same time to get door to door. Weird.

Last night Brian Mulvaney and I caught up with Feedia founders, Alex Williams and Johnny Hartman and TechCrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick (scroll down, you'll find him) at the Venture All Stars party in Seattle. Tim Reha is an energetic and magnanimous host who pulled together a great crowd and a great event. I got reacquainted with Steve Broback, the force behind the Blog Business Summit. I connected with Robert Scoble, met Microsoft's Aaron Brethorst (last of the freelance hackers and greatest swordfighter in the world) showing off his new moo cards.  These business cards define cool. And, had a great conversation with Edelman's Sara Ball on how PR and the blogosphere connect. 

As a veteran of way too many trade shows and industry conferences, I really enjoy the fresh format of these new millennium networking events and "unconferences." Less upfront work, great value for your sponsorship dollar and they provide just the right dose of messaging, announcements and informal demos. But, the real energy come out with the schmoozing and connecting following the formal program.

Brian Mulvaney and I are are on our way to Seattle today for the Venture All Stars 5th Anniversary party. There will video blog show focused on blogging, new media and other forms of communication. We'll be doing a quick demo of the River of News media player in Attensa for Outlook. If you're in Seattle stop by.

In July I wrote about Tris Hussey's experience getting in RSS in Outlook 2007. He gave the beta of Outlook 2007 a try and came back to Outlook 2003 with X1 for search and Attensa for Outlook as his RSS reader. A day doesn't go by when we don't get asked about the differences between reading RSS in Outlook using Attensa versus the Outlook 2007 experience. The short answer is there's a huge difference. Here's the short list...

Attensa for Outlook has:

River of News with AttentionStream prioritization

Persistent search across 18 search engines

Outlook player for podcasts and video and automatic playlist support for iTunes and Windows Media Player

Built-in tagging with del.icio.us synchronization

Auto feed discovery with preview for Firefox and IE

Browse, preview and select from 2000 feeds without leaving Attensa in Outlook

Deep connectivity with the Attensa Feed Server and the Microsoft Common Feed Platform

Attensa for Outlook 2.0 is available now and it's free. You can download Attensa for Outlook  here.

We plan to support Outlook 2007 when it comes out of beta. Here's a detailed look at the differences between Attensa for Outlook 2.0 and Outlook 2007.