MicroPulse thoughts

I had several thoughts when reading Martin’s MicroPulse proposal. It was not easy to get my head around it. I am not sure whether it is appropriate to respond on my blog, but here I go. The thoughts are a bit unstructured and low-level at this stage and are created while reading.

I am a bit reluctant in creating systems. There are already so many things around. But then I am not familiar enough with KnowledgePulse.

The concept of ‘Continuous Partial Attention’ is interesting. With all the information flowing towards our devices (thanks to RSS), we live in an information sea that is very close to us. The question is whether we will pay attention to that sea. If I look at Twitter or Jaiku, then there is a peripheral component. But there are also other examples reminding of radio.

On my platform I created such a sea. Thanks to Growl a small windowlet pops up in the right-top corner of my screen, with the latest tweet. This windowlet stays there for 1 second and dissolves into the background. I have a choice to look at it and read the message, or just let it pass. Information in this windowlet can come from a variety of sources, such as Twitter, Jaiku, last.fm and all kinds of other status messages from local applications. Think also of instant messaging clients, where you notice your friends login and -out. This kind of information flow is like being ‘next to the sea’.

Fortunately there is no attention grabbing. When I do not look at this local sea, then it will be lost, but nothing will be lost.

This is a bit different from beeps from the mail application to indicate that there is new mail, or indicators to show how much new mail, rss-item, etc you have waiting for you.

The idea of an application taking over when there is no foreground activity (afk), reminds me of a screensaver. This screensaver would then sequentially present new Items from the subscribed RSS feeds.

The Growl-messages could be ‘calls for attention’. It however depends how intrusive these calls are. At the moment it is relatively hard for me to react to these calls: I can not click on them, I have to see the associated application and put that application to the front.

As soon as you are going to react to impulses from the sea, you are going in. You are opeining your Twitter client, RSS-client, etc, and are going to read the information for real.

In the MicroPulse description also more intrusive examples of Micropulses are mentioned. I have to ‘click-away’ these pulses, the come back until I did something with it. It reminds me of annoying pop-up, pop-under windows, of bouncing dock-items, etc. All requiring me to change my focus from my current task to something else. I do not want to be overwhelmed by waves from the sea.

The micro-information loop tries to establish the relation between this sea and the user. This relation is determined by the interaction the user has with that information, i.e. the amount of attention the user awards to that information. As described, there can be many levels of (’moe’ tweets whether I like to play Mario Kart with him on the DS) attention.

A question is, whether this attention recording process must be something explicit, as described with the Flash cards.

The idea of a context dependent sea/radio is an interesting one. It might lower the information overload burden, it is no longer necessary to switch contexts. But then these tweets ‘out of context’ are also nice and offer the coffe machine environment.

I have mixed feelings on the recorder thing. I am all in favor, in fact I tried to set up something for my self with, blogs, bookmarks, etc. In reality I do not seem to benefit from it. I guess that this is just the state of art. Recommendation is still extremely lousy. But here seems to main challenge.

For the moment no comments on the system part, it all depends what you want to accomplish.

[Inspiration MicroPulse]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Comments

right, it is all about obtrusiveness. and there will be the problem of many “Continuous Partial Attention” apps fighting for your limited amount of Casual CPA.

one thing is to just glance at something (e.g Moe wanting to play Mario Kart - it is a status message from Moe, and it’s an offer to join, and it is a information about Digital Lifestyle ...).

another thing is actually doing something with micro-information, taking it, processing it further in a kind of “cycle of thinking” that is now going on not just IN the mind but BETWEEN the mind and the system (and, via the system, between a network of minds too).

there is no practicable app out there allowing to DO something with microinformation the way we want here. there are similarities though with (1) the delicious bookmarklet, which in fact is a template for creating met/micro-content in 255 characters, with headline and tags and social extensions (like ‘for:aleene’) - difference: there is no loop-of-items here for thinking/working further on it; (2) the pandora radio widget, which IS creating a sort of a “loop” - by rating the songs/items they (and similar songs/items) keep coming back, in “heavy rotation” so to speak, and i may put them onto my favorite list or sort them out step by step.

one “MicroPulse loop” could be e.g. flow of snippets on Continuous Partial Attention and “micro-attention” from Linda Stone, David Allen/GTD, Malcolm Gladwell/Blink, and many others, and waht i want to do is to further think on it, create notes of my own, DIGEST it step by step.

the most important thing is that this wouldn’t work if the items coming in would be just random—the MicroPulse flows consist of maybe 30 items that were filtered, marked-up and bundled to form a consistent stream of “small pieces loosely joined”.

and there may be 2 or 3 relevant “radio channels” from which one would want to choose on a typical day: a “working loop” (like the example above), maybe a “GTD loop” to call into presence, and further organize, tasks and “next steps”, or maybe a news loop of relevant working notes from the team, which one would want to follow in a collaboration context.

so it is in a way a completely new channel between the mini-window for random micro-attention items you mentioned on one side and “main focus” applications on the other side.

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