Ephraim Schwartz has a thought provoking post - Dumbing down and smarting up via the Web - on his Reality Check blog.

He comments of the thinking of Marc Prensky who came up with the descriptors Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants (way back in 2001) to describe different approaches on how humans use technology to process information.

According to Prensky, Digital Natives are all "native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet."

Digital Immigrants are "those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many of or most aspects of the new technology."

I believe this evolution is already well on its way in the workforce because it's generational. Look at how the newest information workers choose to work and the tools they choose when given the choice. They drive multi-tasking to an entirely new level using multiple IM chat sessions and collaborative workspaces (powered with RSS) to communicate and deliver  information where and when they need it.

They bring a new work ethic based on continuous partial attention that I believe increases productivity. They keep multiple dimensions of their tasks in in their peripheral vision and in their peripheral attention simultaneously. When these techniques are used to optimum advantage, opportunities are spotted more quickly, rapid responses seize theses opportunities and the power of collaboration is brought to bear on problem solving in a natural, free flowing way. 

When attention tools - the power of intelligent prioritization and the automatic discovery and sharing of critical business information are added to the mix -- there is real potential to unlock a new level of productivity.

Ephraim Schwartz has written a great overview of Attensa in InfoWorld based on interview with our co-founder and CTO, Eric Hayes . InfoWorld is featuring an enterprise startup a day in the month of May and we are delighted to be selected.

Here's the take away.

"Attensa's software works by pushing RSS or managed Web feeds to specific users and groups behind the firewall, allowing knowledge workers in the enterprise to cherry-pick just the info they want. On the back end, the Linux-based Attensa Feed Server gathers feeds in the background, and gives IT administrators control of where those feeds go. Meanwhile, on the client side, Attensa has software for Windows, Mac, and BlackBerry, plus plug-ins for Outlook, Lotus SameTime IM, and others. Conveniently, the server takes care of syncing, so that if a user reads something on a BlackBerry, that same item is marked as having been read in Outlook as well.

Behind this basic infrastructure is AttentionStream, the real substance of Attensa's IP. AttentionStream prioritizes content based on a user's behavior, pushing that information to the top of the reader. "AttentionStream has the ability to intelligently and automatically pull information that is important to the user when they want it and push away information that isn’t important when they don’t want it," Hayes says."

This occasionally crops up in our discussions with companies investigating Enterprise 2.0 technologies. In some corporations BLOG is four letter word conjuring up images of sociopathic rantings, and way too much time being devoted to cat pictures and reviews of LOST.

If you ask me, this paranoia boils down to fear of the unknown or maybe it's about lack or respect and lack of trust in employees to do the right things with the tools they have to work with. When you think about it, if you were inclined, you could do more damage to a company's reputation and morale with email and confidential attachments sent to the wrong people than you can with a secure internal blog post.

I'm not sure what drives this perception about blogs and I'm not the only one who has experienced this fear from corporate management. Six Apart's Anil Dash makes getting beyond fear of blogs a key message in his evangelism. The Burton Group's Mike Gotta has seen it and heard it too.  His take away is that companies need examples of how blogs can be used effectively to solve business and communication challenges.

I'm republishing the highlights from his post "Getting Over Fear of Blogs and including the list of blogging applications that make sense for business environments.

You can read Mike's complete post on Collaborative Thinking.

Mike takes it from here:

Regarding Web 2.0 and social software, I find that people are often captivated by the use of these concepts and tools in the consumer market. While some technologists are skeptical, there are also a growing number of people that are wondering how such practices and technologies could be applied internally and whether such use could bring about some degree of business transformation – especially in terms of leveraging worker know-how and collective insight.

The tone and emotion levels however get quite passionate however, when the topic of blogs comes up. There does seem to be agreement that public-facing blogs can have real business value from the perspective of marketing, PR, customer intimacy and community-outreach. That perspective however does not seem to transfer broadly when the conversation shifts to possible internal adoption of blogs. In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a range of opinions that could be represented by the following statements:

• Risk-related: “We’re afraid of what people will say.”
• Productivity-related: “We don’t want people wasting their time.”

Performance-related: “We don’t see the business value.”

The conversation often swings back to the Internet and how blogs are used as a public soapbox to express personal opinions and how bloggers add fuel to emotionally-charged debates on topics many organizations view as a workplace distraction (e.g., politics, sports, entertainment, religion, breaking news, etc.). A good number of people I’ve talked to feel that blogs introduce risk (e.g., hostile workplace), negatively impacts productivity and hinders overall performance of business processes.

I think part of the problem is due to a lack of examples of how blogs can be applied to solve the types of business challenges organizations face on a daily basis.

Internal Communication

There are many situations where organizations need to broadcast information to its workforce without the need for that information to be pushed to its workers in an intrusive manner (e.g., e-mail).

• A Human Resources department can leverage blog technology to continually keep employees updates on various benefit plans, awareness of enrollment dates, etc.
• CXO-level management can leverage blogs to informally communicate company issues related to markets, economics and its competition.
• Organizations can use blogs to communicate information to employees on the various community-outreach and social programs in need of volunteers.

Program / Project Management

Program management offices (PMO) and project management teams often establish operating environments where information may not always be captured and disseminated in a timely manner. The structure of these organizing bodies may challenge its ability to quickly respond, making it difficult to communicate credible and relevant information.

• A PMO blog could provide a journal of activities, issues and future actions that could be valuable not only to workers within the PMO but to those monitoring and tracking the PMO elsewhere in the organization
• A group blog for developers and quality assurance teams could act as a clearinghouse to voice design concerns, for developers to record and report findings or to capture/disseminate software build and fix notifications discovered during development or testing cycles (e.g., shift notes)
• PMO and project teams create a variety of guidelines, procedures and other types of documentation. While wikis are good vehicles for the collaborative work on the content itself, blogs can provide a platform for individuals to provide deeper personal commentary.

Community-building

Organizations have struggled to find common off-the-shelf tools that allow for the capture, dissemination and augmentation of information while also enabling broad participation and community interaction. Facilitating open communication is a key aspect for organizations interested in sharing know-how and creating effective community-building environments (e.g., knowledge management).

• Research organizations have long valued the importance of personal journals and lab notebooks to catalog observations and record insight. Blogs within such an environment not only are of benefit to those within such communities but enable others to “look over the shoulders” of those engaged in such activities.
• Government organizations can use blog systems to enable first responders to share insight and lessons-learned from on-the-job experiences
• Specialists in many different professions (e.g., utilization management nurses, fraud investigators, security experts, underwriters, engineers) can use blogs to more easily communicate methods and practices relevant to their work activities

Business process

A multitude of business activities include capture of unstructured information as part of processing a particular task. Many applications do not naturally handle the type of free-form commentary and annotation users would like to add to a transaction or append to a case file. There are other situations where applications need to deal with conversational information that are not well-supported by traditional application models (e.g., issue tracking, exception handling, problem resolution).

• A competitive intelligence process is often dependent on capturing field observations, rumors and collating information detected from various news sources. Blog systems can provide the platform the collecting and vetting this type of market monitoring, analysis, and opportunity/threat assessment.
• Certain support processes require workers to capture notes as part of their remote activity (e.g., field repair). Offline authoring tools (e.g., Microsoft Windows Live Writer) could be used to compose analysis on a worker’s laptop and then upload to a group blog when network connectivity is available. In other situations, certain work activities might include capture of notes into operational logs. Blog technology can enable capture of task-related notes inline with performance of that operational process.

OK, I'm back.

We use the same tools and techniques internally.

• Our CEO as a blog to share the big picture with Attensa employees
• Our marketing and development teams use secure blogs to keep each group informed on project status, customer wins and the buzz surrounding Attensa
• Our sales and marketing people share competitive insights on a secure blog.
• We've set up a secure blog with our PR and SEO teams to share strategies, metrics and status reports.

Analytics on the Attensa Feed Server gives insight into how this information flows through the organization and helps assess and identify the most effective channels for communicating specific information

Attensa tools make publishing to these internal blogs incredibly easy. I used one of the republishing tools in Attensa for Outlook to share Mike's post this morning. I scanned the headlines from his blog in the River of News. The title "Getting Over Fear of blogs" caught my eye. I hit the Attensa publish icon which launched Windows Live Writer and pre-populates a new  blog post with the all of the copy, links and images - all nicely formatted. I just select the blog I want to publish to from a list. I can easily edit and add context, categories, tags and then republish the post with a click. These tools make it incredibly easy to share these thoughts with everyone subscribing to the blog. 

Charlie Davidson is taking the helm at Attensa as our CEO. Charlie has been deeply involved with Attensa since day one as an investor and advisor. Charlie comes to Attensa with more than 25 years of experience as an executive and investor in companies developing software for financial services markets. He's been instrumental in guiding the development of enterprise RSS applications for Attensa that put web feeds to work in the financial services arena.

Prior to joining Attensa Davidson was CEO/President of StatiaFx, Inc., a developer of software solutions for financial institutions, which was sold to Financial Profiles, Inc. (a business unit of Hanover Insurance Group NYSE: THG).  Following the transaction Charlie served as Financial Profiles’ Vice President of Marketing, Products and Business Strategy.  

Charlie was the Chief Operating Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of the Crabbe-Huson Group, Inc., a Pacific Northwest money management firm to institutions and the nine Crabbe-Huson Funds. The Crabbe-Huson Group ultimately grew to $5 billion in assets under management and sold to Liberty Financial Companies (now part of Bank of America) in 1998.

He graduated from the University of Oregon School of Business and Northwestern School of Law (J.D., magna cum laude). He began his career practicing law with the firm Garvey, Schubert & Barer, where his practice emphasized technology, securities and business transactions.

But resume is only part of the story. Charlie's got vision, energy and leadership skills and an easy going style that makes him great to be around.

All this begs the question - "Where's Craig Barnes?"

His post Onward on Craig's Lemonade answers the question eloquently. Craig is following his passion. Craig is being Craig. That means seeing the magic in a nascent technology, getting out in front of the market and building the next big thing. So now it's on to Pump Networks. It's Web 2.0 and it involves RSS. That's all we can say it for the time being. Stay tuned at Craig's Lemonade.

Scott Gavin has a new enterprise 2.0 blog and it's a must read. His "Meet Charlie - What is Enterprise 2.0" presentation is terrific and creating quite a stir.

If you're looking for a great introduction to Enterprise 2.0 with solid "How To" advice and real world examples, you need to subscribe to this critical blog. Check out this post on "RSS and the Enterprise - Examples."

They say second place is just an award to make losers feel better. In this case we couldn't disagree more. SEOMOZ.org has deemed Attensa for Outlook worthy of a 2007 Web 2.0 Award and we're tickled pink. First place goes to FeedBurner and who can argue with that?

Attensa for Outlook earned:

5 out of 5 stars for usefulness

4 out of 5 stars for usability, interface design and social aspects

An now you don't have to be exclusively an Outlook user to get in this goodness. When you download Attensa for Outlook you also get a stand alone Windows desktop reader that gives you the same feature set outside of Outlook.

GiddyUp! Download Attensa for Outlook. It's free.

Dave Barry has a pretty funny review of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schalbe in the New York Times (you might need a subscription to read the review). Send has been described as the "Miss Manners for the Digital Age" and the "Strunk and White for the Web."

Frankly, it amazes me that this book is number 166 in the Amazon.com Sales Rankings. I tried to find the book at Powell's today but it was sold out. I guess that speaks to the fact that for many of us email really is broken.

For most information workers email is the only tool available for communicating and interacting across the enterprise and its boundaries. Because email is being used for much more than it was originally designed for, resources like Send are a logical result to help people use the tool more effectively.

Fortunately the tool set for communicating is expanding, giving people more choices and flexibility for communicating and collaborating. People can choose between email, chatting, SMS, VOIP and publishing and subscribing to feeds based on what they want to communicate, who they want to communicate with and what level of interaction is required by the communication.

 When I think about the difference between email and feeds I think about the difference between news and conversation. Email, IM, SMS are all great for answering questions and responding to requests for information. Feeds are great for monitoring and alerting. In a managed enterprise RSS environment feeds can be channeled across the communication tool set so that people can get the information they want, where and how they want it. Combine channeling with smarter tools like Attensa's intelligent prioritization and our communication becomes crisper and knowledge flow becomes more fluid.

For a technology with Simple for a middle name, users are baffled by how to create custom feeds and content. The new version of the Attensa Feed Server provides a very simple answer. Use your email client. Users can create and deliver custom feeds and articles as easily as writing and sending an email. Your feed can be shared on the server and team members with permission can contribute to feed using email. It's a great publishing/subscribe mash-up tool. Here's how it works: (but to really see it in action, request a Feed Server demo).

 This is from Mike Gotta at Collaborative Thinking on Zimbra adding a Feed Reader

"The good news: many vendors are adding feed reader capabilities to their client platforms.

The bad news: many vendors are adding feed reader capabilities to their client platforms.

If you are an enterprise organization and looking at feed readers across varies collaboration, portal and content systems - remember - there are a lot of architectural and infrastructure issues to consider in terms of security, network management, feed management, etc. There are also some really important user needs as well - including synchronization of feeds across multiple client user experiences, including read/unread marks, etc. If you are committed to a Windows client, then look to see if the vendor is integrating with the Windows RSS Platform. If you are using a more complete end-to-end XML Syndication systems, then make sure that the vendor providing the client reader is able to integrate with those vendors as well.

What you really want to avoid is a potpourri of clients all handing RSS/Atom feeds differently (each well in its own right but chaotic when viewed as a collection of feed services)."

At Attensa we believe the platform is the product and that integrated readers built using a consistent architecture are essential to a well managed end-to-end XML syndication system. The Attensa Managed RSS Environment delivers clean, consistent synchronization, control over directing specific feeds to users and groups, multiple readers providing pervasive access to feeds, intelligent prioritization, scalability and reporting an analytics.

As our line of readers grows we are now offering multiple ramps to provide pervasive access to Enterprise RSS feeds. Our reader line-up includes a full featured Windows desktop reader and Outlook reader(download them here - they're free), a reader for Sametime Instant Messaging for alerts and time sensitive collaborative feeds and a Web reader integrated with the Attensa Feed Server. They all use the same architecture to facilitate "knowledge flow."

Jeremy Wagstaff is writing about Attention in his Loose Wire column in the Wall Street Journal and he's mentions Attensa in his Loose Wire blog.

We couldn't agree more with his take away. "This is just the beginning. Further down the track, tools like Particls (and Attensa - my edit) will feed into our attention streams to find out what we're paying attention to and use that information to further hone their grasp of what we want to know. Expect them to continue the march of personalizing not just your hunt for information but the way it's delivered to you -- when, where and how."

Attensa's first step is the automatic prioritization of articles based on your reading behaviors. Location is playing a role with the ability to channel specific feeds to specific access points (the Web, the desktop, your smartphone and instant messaging)so the information you want (and just the information you want) shows up where you want it.