Attensa: 'attention is the holy grail'

Craig Barnes, founder of Attensa (RSS reader for Outlook and has a toolbar version for Firefox), posted on the subject of Attention yesterday. Not only that, but Craig has made it clear that the whole Attention data space is of strategic importance and an area Attensa is going to pursue:

"Well, at Attensa we indeed believe attention is the holy grail to solving the emerging (but heretofore irrelevant) problem of information overload.

...We will soon release our Attensa 1.0 for Outlook. While the obvious and most talked about application of our AttentionStream technology is the forthcoming article level prioritization and recommendation (as opposed to subscription recommendations) it is only synchronization that will first utilize this infrastructure. Recommendation will follow soonafter. (As will our Enterprise Server.)"

Craig also mentions that attention.xml will be supported, but:

"recognize that it only scratches the surface as to what is possible with sophisticated attention stream analysis. Attention can help users cut through information overload and "attention" is not just web browser clickstreams to better target ads."

I totally agree with Craig's view on this last point (see my '20 thoughts on Attention post'). If you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll know I'm thinking about Attention recently, so I'm really excited to see Attensa taking this from theory into practice. Also interesting to see Rok Hrastnik has posted on this subject too.

I'd love to know what thoughts Craig has on the role OPML has to play in the Attention space, if at all.

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Related: My attention writings

Tags: OPML, RSS, attention,  attention.xml