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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

On Thursday evening  at Supernova, the real world and the virtual world can watch Craig Barnes, Attensa CEO, explain in five minutes why the AttentionStream technology and products we are building matter. It's all part of the Supernova Connected Innovators showcase and gala created in collaboration with TechCrunch.

If you have a Second Life account you can catch streaming video of Craig's pitch in the Supernova Lounge.

You can keep up on the Supernova happenings in the Supernova media center and you can access the Supernova blog, wiki and more at the Supernova Community Connection.

It's good when your company name begins with the letter A. That puts Attensa at the top of the list of the Supernova Connected Innovators. Attensa joins 11 other companies with "extraordinary potentional to create new markets and shape the connected future."

The companies were selected by Supernova and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch from nearly 100 submissions. Thanks.

Supernova 2006  is June 21 -23. In San Francisco.

Yesterday Craig Barnes, Attensa's CEO and Seth Goldstein, CEO of Root Markets, discussed their views on how applied attention technology works for users. The Attensa approach is to use AttentionStreams to continuously and automatically prioritize information so that the most useful information bubbles to the top, helping to control the flow of the RSS information firehose. The Root Market approach is let user track their clickstreams on the Web and to use and share their history in a marketspace that trades qualified sales leads for offers of value.

The Agile Buzz has the play by play here.

And David Utter at WebProNews raises a valid question on the privacy concerns tied to an Attention based marketplace.

Attensa is partnering with Six Apart on the Business Blogging Seminar series. Six Apart makes world-class blogging software, including Movable Type and TypePad. Their tools have helped 75% of Fortune 500 companies start blogging and allowed these them to minimize their technological overhead.

Together we'll be talking about how combining the power or blogs and RSS can

• improve customer loyalty
• turn customers into an extended sales force
• help you save money on marketing
• position your company as a thought leader
• improve internal and external communication practices
• get the right information -- to the right people -- at the right time

Speakers include:

• Anil Dash: Chief Evangelist, Six Apart
• D.L. Byron: Blog Business Summit  / Boeing Case Study
• Brian Mulvaney, Director of RSS Platform Marketing, Attensa

The first seminar is in  San Franciso on April 20th  and it's sold out! Look for upcoming seminars in New York and LA

I spent a lot of time over the past few days looking at the other Syndicate exhibitors and I realized Portland companies made up a sizable percentage of the vendors hawking their wares, sharing the love and spreading the RSS gospel at the conference.

In addition to Attensa, Janet Johnson was working the Marqui marketing magic. Charles Smith, from Pheedo was mixing it up and Jon Maroney and Scott Rogers were waving the flag for FreeRange.

With four out of the 19 Syndicate exhibitors from Stumptown, there's more than just coffee brewing in Portland.

We're off to the Syndicate Conference next week. We'll be making some product and technology announcements and we'll be demonstrating Attensa Online.

We're sponsoring the Syndication Technology and Trends track covering mobile RSS, tagging, structured blogging, wikis, vertical market syndication, attention tracking, social software, IRC and more.

There are some great speakers lined up including
Marc  Canter, Tantek  Çelik, Anil  Dash, Salim  Ismail, Steve  Gillmor, and Mary  Hodder
 

If you want to connect with Attensa at the conference send me an email or give me a call 503.757.4957.

The Podcast Hotel is coming to Portland September 6 - 8 and we'll be there. For three days in September Portland's very groovy Jupiter Hotel will be the Podcast Center of the World for people with podcasting passion.

Alex Williams gives a great description of the "unconference" in his Podcast Hotel blog. "This is not Panelfest. No boring panels. This is about the conversation."