When you boil it all down,attention is really about using technology and tools to pull the information we want toward us when we want it and to push things that aren't important away so we can concentrate on the task at hand and stay in the flow.

Our dev team has been working on article level prioritization since we launched Attensa and we'll be previewing the stellar results of their efforts at ETech. The Attensa for Outlook 2.5 Beta 2 is the first attention driven RSS reader that prioritizes articles (not just feeds) based on an individual's reading habits. This is a major step forward in our AttentionStream technology development.

You can read the news release here.

You'll be able to try it out for yourself (for free of course) on April 10th when we post Attensa for Outlook 2.5 Beta 2.

The new version integrates an AttentionStream® Learning Engine that automatically pulls articles that are most important to you to the top of the River of News. Stars indicate the estimated relevance based on your reading habits.

Attensa’s unique AttentionStream Learning Engine observes and learns from the user’s feed and article reading behaviors and works on the principle that past and present actions predict future behavior. Deep analytics of article content are matched to a personalization system that automatically prioritizes and recommends new articles that will be of interest to the reader.

The new approach matches content cues with personas (readers and deleters, skimmers, active readers and more) and matches their content choices and behaviors to rank the articles. The goal is to deliver a powerful, personalized, attention-driven reading experience.

This is much more than the popularity contest social networking sites use to suggest content. That can be interesting, at best, but when it comes to quickly getting up to speed as part of a work flow, frankly I'm more interested in cutting through to what I'm interested in.

There's more The 2.5 Beta 2 is a bottleneck breaker that significantly improves the RSS handling performance of Outlook 2007 (it also works with XP and Outlook 2003). The new version gives you two options for channeling articles into Outlook. User can stores their articles in a separate file or they can bypass Outlook’s storage completely by pulling articles on demand into the Attensa for Outlook River of News. Both methods speed up Outlook performance significantly and cut PST file bloat which drags down Outlook performance.

The Attensa team is heading to off to ETech. We'll be in San Diego showing the latest Attensa Feed Server enhancements and a new beta version of Attensa for Outlook. Look for the announcement on Monday. If you're going too, stop by, say hello and take a look.

The word is out. Just Google "Outlook 2007 is slow" and you'll see what I mean.

The Burton Group's Peter O'Kelly in a ComputerWorld article

"Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah, said he thinks some of the sluggishness arises from Microsoft's decision to let users download RSS feed data into Outlook's local e-mail file in the form of either a .pst or .ost file.

Adding RSS feeds can quickly swell the in-boxes of many users to more than 2GB of data, according to O'Kelly. He said that causes Outlook 2007, especially when it's running on PCs that don't have large amounts of memory, to write to the hard drive much more often than it typically does -- resulting in performance slowdowns. Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to better tune that part of the software before the next major release, O'Kelly said."

You don't have to wait for Microsoft. Attensa for Outlook bypasses the Outlook 2007 RSS bottleneck. Attensa for Outlook 2.5 streamlines the interaction between the user interface and the Attensa engine to significantly improve the RSS handling performance of Outlook 2007. To further optimize Outlook performance, the new version offers Outlook 2007 users two options for channeling articles into Outlook. User can stores their articles in a separate file or they can bypass Outlook’s storage completely by pulling articles on demand into the Attensa for Outlook River of News. Both methods speed up Outlook performance significantly and cut PST file bloat which drags down Outlook performance. You can download the Attensa for Outlook 2.5 beta here. It's free.

Fourth in a series from Attensa. The first time you execute a persistent search you can bring on a firehose of information. Here are some tips for controlling the flow.

Don’t select every search engine. Use the search engines that are likely to deliver the most useful results.

Tagging Search Engines

• Delicio.us tags is a refined tool because the tagged results have already been filtered by users searching similar topics

Blog Search

• Start with multiple engines then pare them down to eliminate duplicates
  • Google Blogs
  • Technorati
  • Feedster
  • Plazoo
  • News Releases
  • Yahoo! News

Image Search Engines

• Flickr

Video Search Engine

• YouTube

Create a sub-category labeled with the search text to help organize the results and to help you identify the most useful results. Delete search feeds that are delivering off target or duplicates. Narrow your search terms to more precisely define your search parameters and focus your results.

Once the search is refined you will be able to quickly scan the results a daily basis for

Use Attensa for Outlook to Read Feeds Offline

A popular analogy for feed reading is that Web feeds are like a Tivo for the Internet. With Attensa for Outlook you can time shift to read your feeds when you have the time. Having your articles available offline gives you more flexibility to catch up than by relying on a browser reader that requires an Internet connection.

Second in a series from Attensa.

Look Before You Leap – Preview Before You Subscribe

It’s so easy to subscribe to new feeds that most new users quickly over-subscribe and begin drowning in a sea of information.

Think through each subscription. Use the Attensa preview feature to judge the value of each new feed. Don’t just look at the headlines, look at the article content. Does the feed provide full content, or just teasers forcing a visit to the originating site? Ask yourself how you will benefit from subscribing before pulling the Add Feed trigger

Stay on Top of Critical Information with Desktop Alerts

The Desktop Alerts feature places an Attensa icon in your System Tray. When new articles are available, an alert dialog is displayed just above this icon, showing you which feeds have new articles, and how many articles are available.

The Attensa Desktop Alert toaster allows users to track fast breaking business information whether you are working in Outlook or not. The Desktop Alert appears when your selected priority feeds are updated with new articles.

You can use this power for good or evil. Use it too frequently on too many feeds and you’ll only contribute to information overload. Use it judiciously and you’ll be notified the instant new information is available from your carefully selected list of must read feeds.

We live in an interrupt driven world. You can’t control the flow of email into your inbox, but you can control how frequently your feeds are updated.

With Attensa you can get as granular in your updating schedule as you want. You can specify global settings for how often your feeds are updated, and you can specify updates for individual feeds and/or categories. For most feeds, updating hourly should do the trick. You may want critical feeds to update more frequently.

Don’t be Afraid to Delete, and Don’t Feel Guilty About It

Give yourself permission to ignore things that don't look threatening or critical. It’s ok to delete articles that aren’t relevant. Attensa for Outlook can help. It cleans up nicely. You can set a schedule for automatically deleting read and unread articles.

Second in a series from Attensa.

Organize and Categorize

The key is to organize your feeds so that the most important information is easy to access. Organize your feeds based around projects you are working on, your job role, teams you are involved with and keywords or topics that are relevant to you.

With Attensa for Outlook and the Feed Server it is easy to create a taxonomy and folder structure to help you keep your feeds grouped logically by subject. You can easily create folders and sub-folders, name them, and move feeds between folders. You can keep your feeds organized by simply dragging and dropping Outlook folders.

Make a “Must Read” folder for feeds you can’t afford to miss. When you are in a time crunch just scan through your Must Read folder and leave the others for later.

Give your feeds meaningful titles. Most blogs have clever names that have some significance to the author but don’t mean much to the readers. You can easily change the feed name to something that makes sense to your own organization or system.

Channel Feeds to the Access Points That Make Sense

Attensa gives you the ability to channel your feeds to folders in Attensa for Outlook, to your Outlook inbox, to a browser reader connected to the Attensa Feed Server, to your mobile phone and to Sametime Instant Messaging.

Think about how, when and where you want to access your feeds. Time critical information requiring instant response should trigger a desktop alert and connect to Outlook, your phone and Sametime. News content can be channeled to Outlook and the Web reader.

With Attensa’s AttentionStream synchronization, you’ll always be up to date regardless of where you are reading. The Attensa AttentionStream synchronization monitors every action so updating feeds, reading and deleting articles, subscribing to new feeds and adding tags are instantly synchronized in Outlook, Onlineand on your mobile phone or PDA, and in Sametime.

Here's the first in a series of tips from Attensa on managing, channeling, organizing and reading feeds to beat information overload.

The Difference between Feeds and Email – News versus Conversation

There’s a difference between feeds and email. Think of feeds as sources of news, and email as requests for dialogue and conversation.

Email is great for answering questions and responding to requests for information. Feeds are great for monitoring fluid events like project updates, real time market and competitive developments and ongoing research.

Monitoring feeds is far more efficient than browsing and searching the web. It can eat hours a week to visit and search every relevant website, blog and wiki covering your market and project load. Subscribing cuts the time you would normally spend surfing and searching by delivering relevant information automatically.

The Secret to Speed Feed Reading - Scan and Skim

Think of your feeds as filtering and automatically delivering the news that is relevant to you. Just like with newspapers and magazines, not every article delivered to your feed reader will be of earth shattering importance. Approach feed reading the same way you read a newspaper or a magazine, scan the headlines. Open the articles that catch your attention and don’t worry about the rest.

One way to manage feed reading is to set up a specific time each day to scan your feeds. First thing in the morning is good time to quickly see if important developments need your attention.

When you are scanning your articles look for trends. If there are numerous posts on a topic of interest, pay attention and process the information while the idea is new.

Important things have their own way of surfacing. They catch your eye or your co-workers’ eye(s). When you find critical relevant information, share it. Forward the article like an email, tag it and sync with del.icio.us or use the republishing feature to post it internally.

Good news - Bad news - Good news

The goods news: With the integration of RSS into Vista and Outlook 2007, Microsoft is going to open the eyes of millions to the world of RSS as an essential communication tools.

The bad news: To be perfectly frank, the RSS experience in Outlook 2007 is lame.

The good news: We just posted Attensa for Outlook 2.5 Beta. It's the smart way to read RSS in Outlook 2007.

Download the Attensa for Outlook 2007 Beta here. Of course it's free.

If you are using Outlook 2007, here are 14 reasons why Attensa for Outlook 2.5 will give you a better experience reading and managing RSS feeds and articles in Outlook 2007. 

1. Optimized Outlook Performance - Separate PST Files for RSS Feeds

2. Update feeds and delete articles on a defined schedule

3. Safe and secure subscriptions to internal and external feeds

4. Advanced Compatibility and synchronization with the Microsoft RSS Platform

5. Create, import and export OPML files

6. Automatically prioritize you feeds with predictive ranking AttentionStream

7. One click blog republishing and easy editing with a connection to Windows Live Writer

8. Automatically find, preview and add RSS RSS feeds from toolbars in Internet Explorer and Firefox

9. Powerful automated persistent search tools

10. Keep feeds organized with tagging and categories

11. Easily play audio and video content in the River of News

12. Desktop alert toaster

13. New security enhancements

14. Secure connectivity to internal and external web feeds and AttentionStream reporting with Attensa Feed Server.

We want to know what you think. The Attensa for Outlook 2.5 Beta Forum is here.