Curated for content, computing, data, information, and digital experience professionals

Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 68 of 75)

Continuous Partial Attention

Linda Stone is talking about “continuous partial attention” a phrase she coined in 97 or 98. What is it? It is what I am doing right now, paying partial attention to Linda talking, partial to writing this blog entry, partial to those sitting around me rustling papers or not, I am also interspersing all this with thoughts of lunch, what session I will attend this afternoon, und so weiter …. We all do it.

It is not surprising. It is the way the brain has always worked (well at least for a while – remember all those cognitive science experiments in the 70s) – it is now just more explicit and we are getting better at it. Or at least some of us are; as much as I do it my daughter leaves me in the dust.

Apparently Linda has seen a backlash about the idea, but, as she said, “…continuous partial attention isn’t bad or good – it just is.”

Just as technologies are only tools that can be used for good or bad, our brain hardware can also be used for better or worse, to help or hinder. Our brain functions can be mis-used just like technology. As we get better with continuous partial attention, the result can be beneficial or rude. (e.g., easier to be rude and interrupt when you feel like it – it is not always OK) we have to learn the ethics as well as the efficiencies.

There are also some interesting challenges for product development. There are different tolerances for multi-processing, and these change even within one human unit, e.g., when you are tired vs. alert.

ETech

I’m not much of a live blogger, but I am at O’Reilly’s ETech conference, (which has already been well worth the trip), and others are covering it just fine without any help from me – for example Ray Ozzie’s talk on O’Reilly’s Radar.

Gilbane San Francisco Brochure Available

The brochure for our April Conference on Technologies for Content Applications and our Conference on Enterprise Digital Rights Management has been mailed. A 765k PDF version is available. Naturally, the speaker and exhibitor listings on the event website are already more up-to-date, but the PDF version has the schedule and session descriptions.

The Reality of Web 2.0: OReilly Medias SafariU Leads by Example

Hopefully you got to hear Mary and Bill on today’s radio show. Next up is Leonor, who will join O’Reilly’s C.J. Rayhill in a webinar next Wednesday, February 15 at 2:00pm EST to talk about how O’Reilly Media expanded into the textbook publishing market by creating a custom publishing platform that enables educators to produce more targeted and less expensive teaching materials using MarkLogic Server.
See more details or Register today.
Also see Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg’s blog post.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention you can read Leonor’s case study!

New Gilbane Government Conference with CMS Watch

As Tony over at CMS Watch says, he has been nagging us for a long time to do a conference in Washington DC focused on content technologies for federal government applications. Tony got his wish but only by agreeing to help!

Our new conference will be at the Reagan Building, June 13 -15, 2006, and is being produced in conjunction with CMS Watch with Tony as the conference chair. We’ve done a fair bit of work for the government over the years and are looking forward to doing more in DC, and to working with Tony on the event. There is a call for papers, and the deadline for submissions is February 28, 2006.

Gilbane Conference San Francisco program posted

The full schedule and program descriptions for both our Content Management Technologies and Enterprise Digital Rights Management conferences are now posted. 60+ speakers have been chosen so far and they will be posted in a few days. Both conferences take place at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, April 24 – 26, 2006. Note that we have added quite a bit of new content.
Registration is also open.

Content Management Professionals – Election Results

Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) announced that Mary Laplante and Scott Abel have been elected to the 2006-2007 CM Pros Board of Directors and that Janus Boye and Mollye Barrett have been elected to serve on the organization’s Management Committee as director of member relations and director of communications, respectively. Scott and Mary were elected to replace two outgoing Board members – me and Ann Rockley – whose terms expire this month. Seth Gottlieb, Erik Hartman, and Samantha Starmer remain on the Board until January 2007.
Over the past 15 months, the organization has grown to more than 600 members and continues to expand rapidly. It has been gratifying to see the organization grow, and a pleasure to work with the organization, which I will continue to do as a regular member. Congratulations to Scott, Janus, and Mollye, and especially to our own Mary Laplante! Also, congratulations to the other nominees for being willing (and very able) to serve, and for helping to make the organization strong by their participation in the election process.
Not a member yet? Join up!

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