There has been a lot of buzz about a new breed of Attention based readers lately. Chris Abraham writes about Particls on Marketing Conversations and Jack Vinson writes about AideRSS here.

A great attention driven reader should make you feel like you need a tinfoil hat to protect you from its accurate mind reading powers. (Thank you Chris for perfect mental image).

I thought it might be helpful to take a deeper look into how these attention driven RSS readers differ in their approaches to finding relevant content. All of these tools are free so you can easily check them out and see for yourself which approach works best for your personal workflow.

AideRSS features PostRank™, a scoring system that ranks each article on relevance and reaction. AideRSS uses the explicit attention behaviors of others to rank feeds. The PostRank is a popularity contest ranking of explicit attention behaviors that takes into account the number of comments, bookmarks and trackbacks a given post receives. AideRSS depends on information from digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket and Bloglines to work efficiently. These sites track the behavior of the most proactive readers who explicitly rate, comment and tag blog posts.

The challenge with this approach is that it focuses on the few to deliver results to the many. AideRSS gives you collective recommendation, not really a personalized recommendation. It ignores the lurkers and passive readers who may find highly relevant material but just file it away in their heads. This approach may also be prone to gaming and unchecked blog spam that can drastically impact results. More importantly it ignores your personal reading behavior which is ultimately the most significant indicator of what is personally relevant to you.

For PostRank to work it requires time to pass to allow for comments, trackbacks and bookmarks to accumulate. For time critical information this is a non-starter. In the enterprise getting the right information at the right time is the difference between success and failure. By the time the PostRank rating scales, you've may miss critical time sensitive information. It's like getting yesterday's news today.

There are some real advantage in this approach. If you can discount the time element, the PostRank technique is best suited for sites with lots of traffic and frequent posting covering content that isn't time sensitive. You can turn the RSS spigot up and down to control the flow and it eliminates duplicate posts. Best of all you can subscribe to a single filtered feed with top ranked articles from all of your feeds. (Note: you can get the same effect with the Article Ranking view in Attensa without setting up a special feed).

If you flip this tool on its head, the true benefit in AideRSS may be its value to publishers as an excellent reporting tool.

Particls

I might be missing the big picture but in my analysis but here's my take. Particls is a persistent search tool with smart filters requiring manual tweaking to optimize relevancy. Keywords are tracked and articles are displayed. I played with it and tried the keyword attention, Enterprise 2.0 and Attensa. After a few minutes articles starting show up in the sidebar that contained my search parameters. Posts on Attensa and Enterprise 2.0 were relevant but not complete. My search on attention produced articles on every topic under the sun with the word attention in the headline. On the plus side, there weren't any duplicates, which is a flaw in the current persistent search technique used by Attensa.

Particls is more of an intention capture tool than an attention tool. For Particls to be effective it requires constant attention (no pun intended). You create and tweak smart filters manually to improve results. From my own use I couldn't really discern any automatic ranking.

The Particls river-of-news sidebar is a paradox. The tool that is supposed to focus your attention ends up being a distraction. Articles flow by and if you snooze you lose. Articles are difficult to organize. In my own workflow I like to keep by feeds organized by subject and project and check out the articles when it best fits my schedule. I use alerts for time critical information.

Attensa AttentionStream

Attensa uses an AttentionStream based on machine learning techniques to bubble-up the most relevant content from all of your feeds to the surface. The AttentionStream technology behind Attensa's Article Ranking View of your feeds combines content cues (keyword, search terms, authors, titles, tags and more) with your personal explicit and implicit attention behaviors to provide a relevancy ranking. The beauty in this approach is you don't have to do anything special to get optimized results.

Attensa’s predictive ranking AttentionStream™ technology continuously observes and analyzes explicit and implicit behavior as you read and process feeds and articles. By continuously analyzing AttentionStream™ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and the number of articles read, deleted and ignored, RSS articles can be displayed in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to you. Feed and article priorities are constantly refined as the continuous stream of attention is processed. You don't have to change your behavior to get the most benefit. And, it's personalized attention - not group think. No tweaking, no adjusting, the inscrutable Attention engine works in the background continuously optimizing your ranking in real time. For the enterprise these behaviors can be tracked through metrics and reports that can be used to identify the most efficient communication channels for getting the right information to the right people and internal publishers can get reports on how their content is being consumed

The Attensa approach isn't perfect but the important stuff does have a way of coming to the surface. 

Ask 275 IT decision makers which Web 2.0 applications have the highest business value and they'll tell you RSS and podcasting have the best ROI. Forrester surveyed 275 IT professionals on their firms' Web 2.0 implementations and found that Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is the highest value technology, with nearly one in four reporting "substantial value."

According to the report, RSS is being used most frequently for corporate communications or content aggregation, while one in three respondents said it was used for external marketing.

These applications are just scratching the surface. Kirk Kness, the VP of Innovation at T Rowe Price Investment Technologies has great way of thinking about the role of managed RSS platforms like the Attensa Feed Server in the Enterprise.

"The most important task on our plate is to make our people smarter by making our information smarter. RSS will be a cornerstone in our foundation. It reduces friction in the context of what people do. RSS is a great way to flow information."

It's funny how two completely different experiences can connect. In trying to understand the why behind the headlines, I started reading Rory Stewart's books which chronicle his experiences in the Middle East. The Places In Between  recounts his experience walking alone across Afghanistan following the US arrival. A copy of  The Histories by Herodotus, accompanied Stewart on his walk.

Herodotus was an adventurer and a traveler who explored the known world of the time in the 5th century B.C. E. and wrote about the places he visited, the people he met and the stories he heard. He might be considered the first his historian. Certainly he is the first international journalist. On his solo walk Stewart retraces some of the same geography traveled by Herodotus.

I became so intrigued with Herodotus that I'm now reading Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski, a beautifully written book that is the embodiment of the flow in its rhythm and pace.

About a month ago we started using Jive Software's Clearspace at Attensa for our company and department collaborative efforts. Jive Software is a Portland company focused on Enterprise 2.0 and they have created a remarkable tool. Clearspace has spread across Attensa like wildfire.  As a company we have used, or tried to use, essentially every collaborative tool available. They each have their strengths and weaknesses and have been put to use by departments or project teams to one degree or another. Clearspace is different. Everyone at Attensa has adopted it enthusiastically. That says a great deal about Clearspace.It's not a blog or a wiki. It's a real community and it has fundamentally changed the way we communicate as a company.

This weekend I was reading Travels with Herodotus and I was struck by this passage. We don't gather around the fire very frequently at Attensa but we are a community. The new fire may be the glow from our displays and the connectedness provided by new collaborative tools, social networks and a more honest communication as we go about our jobs.

They listen, the fire burns, someone adds more wood, the flame's renewed warmth quickens thought, awakens the imagination. The spinning of tales is almost unimaginable without a fire crackling somewhere nearby, or without the darkness of a house illuminated by an oil lamp or a candle. The fire's light attracts, unites, galvanizes attentions. The flame and the community. The flame and the history. The flame and the memory. Heraclutis who lived before Herodotus, considered fire to be the origin of all matter, the primordial substance. Like fire, he said, everything is in eternal motion, everything is extinguished only to flare up again. Everything flows, but in flowing, it undergoes transformation. So it is with memory.

So it is with collaboration.

There’s a consistent theme in our customers’ inquiries and interest in the RSS versus Email debate that involves both the content consumption and content creation side of the equation.

Our conversations with Enterprise 2.0 project team members from financial services, technology, education, and industry analysts share a common thread. They are all struggling with the cultural challenges of easing the transition between the the old world of email and attachments and the new world of persistence and subscription. They are all looking for publishing and delivery tools that allow their users to have it their way -- in their RSS reader or in their inbox.

1. Use Attensa for Outlook in its Outlook centric use mode. Feeds look like folders, posts look like email. Easy for any Outlook user to get up the learning curve fast. I know there are lots of sound technical reasons to suppress this use case (primarily PST file bloat) but it's the best way to spoon feed newbies RSS. From there they can evolve to the river-of-news, intelligent prioritization, tagging, reading feeds in Sametime, on their BlackBerry and anywhere that matches the content to their attention, location and personal workflow.
2. Use the server to push feeds to the inbox through Exchange for newbies and email lovers and use the server to push feeds to Attensa feed reading clients for the early adopters. Give users the flexibility to decide where they want to access the content. It's likely that an individual's preferences and access points will change as they grow more comfortable with feeds and feed reading. Push and lock down the content on the server for appropriate feeds but let users decide when are where to read them.
3. Publish a custom feed from an email client. In theory this makes the transition for creating and publishing new content easier. We've given people to the basic tool kit to get this done on the Attensa Feed Server. It’s another step in the integration of Read|Write world.

In the end, I think our customers are looking for a tool set that lets the content creator publish once and distribute anywhere and that lets content consumers access content anywhere, anytime in the tools that match their personal workflow.

We're getting there.