Harvard Business Review has a list of the 100 breakthrough ideas for 2007.
At number 7 they have "Continuous Partial Attention."
What they describe is exactly what I was getting at with my two pieces on Internet Multitasking Syndrome.
I will probably re-blog this as the date approaches.
March 15th-17th I’ll be at the College Media Advisers spring national conference in NYC.
To learn and to give a talk.
Playing Well with Others: Community Journalism & Social Networking
Rule number one in new media is respect and engage the community you
serve. Learn why you need to share the microphone with the audience and
strategies on how to get readers to join the conversation.
David Cohn, editor, NewAssignment.net
Won’t you join me?
It’s not often that I get entwined into Digg politics. During the September boycott I stayed quiet. Although I helped journalists get in touch with Diggers that wanted to talk, I kept to myself — as I tend to do when it comes to Digg drama.
But right now I feel compelled to blog.
About two days ago I noticed a new Digger who was getting a lot of front page stories. My initial reaction. Good for him!
Sicc, with his light green play arrow, however, seemed to be everywhere I turned.
That’s fine Digidave — don’t think twice about it. I’ve seen plenty of people become obsessed with Digg. They’ll submit an unhealthy amount of stories until they clog my ‘friends submitted tool,’ and I can delete them and never worry about it again.
Then I came across this post, which broke down the numbers that Sicc has been churning out — and I realized that something fishy was going on.
Sicc joined Digg just over a month ago. In that month he has garnered:
An overall ranking of 57
Has Dugg 7,427 (NOTE: I’ve been on Digg almost a year and I have 8,041)
Submitted 933 stories
I’ve spoken with Jay Adelson before and one thing he stressed was that Digg is a self-policing community. It relies on individuals being taken to task. Assuming the information on Sicc has been overlooked, I’m going to take this post to put it out there in the open again to let the community come to their own judgments.
On any given day, Lindsay, a 24-year-old office worker in New York, can be found with several windows open in her Web browser. When she is not sending e-mails or browsing MySpace, she is chatting with her friends or co-workers through AIM sometimes with multiple conversations going at once.
The New York Times is her homepage, giving her the latest news every morning and recently she downloaded Firefox where she checks the RSS feed for the latest headlines.
This is how Lindsay stays connected to the world. But at times the overflow of information can cause distractions. In an age of instant communication people are accustomed to getting news from multiple sources quickly and constantly, but with so many means of information on her plate, it’s easy for Lindsay to just click away, another case of Internet Multitasking Syndrome.
Over at College Media Innovation there is talk about the new skill set that journalists need to keep up with the pace of information on the Web. They highlight a scene with Cory Doctorw at a conference surfing the Internet. It comes via Seth Godin.
I sat next to Cory at a conference today. It was like playing
basketball next to Michael Jordan. Cory was looking at more than 30
screens a minute. He was bouncing from his mail to his calendar to a
travel site and then back. His fingers were a blur as he processed
inbound mail, visiting more than a dozen sites in the amount of time it
took for my neck to cramp up. I’m very fast, but Cory is in a different
league entirely. Rereading this, I can see I’m not doing it justice. I
wish I had a video…This was never a skill before. I mean, maybe if you were an air
traffic controller, but for most of us, most of the time, this data
overload skill and the ability to make snap judgments is not taught or
rewarded.As the world welcomes more real-time editors working hard in
low-overhead organizations, I think it’s going to be a skill in very
high demand.
It is a skill. One that I find myself becoming increasingly good at, but also worried about the consequences. (read on)
