correlate

Information overload has been and will continue to be a growing problem due to the natural growth of the web and the exponential growth of valuable user generated content such as blogs. New technologies and methodologies to deal with it and I believe we’ll see a wave of solutions hit the web in short but due time to deal with it.

My friend and colleague, Daniela, was the first to bring to my attention (no pun intended) with her post on Touchstone, now called Particls, which is an application leveraging APML. APML stands for ‘attention profiling mark-up language’ which allows an application to build a dynamic attention profile based on what you look at and read.

The idea is interesting and Particls is making some headway. I am an alpha tester of the software and while intrigued, I’m still not sold on the idea as of yet simply because I think for it to work, you have to have an engine tuned quite well for it to predictive of what you want to look at based on what you’ve done historically. I believe the ultimate question is do most people really read the same topics or themes all the time?

Chris Saad, founder of Particls, had an interesting post yesterday on attention management and Web 3.0. While I think attention management software may find its place in the overall web scheme, I agree with Chris’ point that it is not Web 3.0.

First I agree with Chris’ point attention management software has its place in the current web, it processes what you read and puts up-front-and-center predictively what you would want to read. Secondly, I believe the Web 3.0 is going to be the ‘Semantic Web’ or the semantic web will be a very big piece of it. We simply need to get to the next level where the data within web content can be utilized at the data level and not the document level. Let’s take the leap where APML extends to profile your attention on the data within documents and not just the documents, at that point APML would be very Web 3.0.