A thought on interest and attention
Laura Fitton's post on tools she'd like to see for Twitter got me thinking about a related problem in aligning attention and interest, so I'd like to add to her list. The problem: It's hard, though not impossible, to align the attention a given blog/tweet/IM/email demands to the interest we have in it.
As an example, take myself and three of interests that I occasionally mention on Twitter.
The set of people that are actually interested in all three of these things is pretty minimal, and that's just a sampling of three things I mention on a regular basis.
Twitter's approach to this issue is to minimize the attention that everything receives. That seems to work pretty well for Twitter. Other systems (I'm looking at you Email) tend to maximize the attention that every message receives. Some systems make an attempt to match attention to interest and I'd like to see more of that type of work either as built-in features or as add-ons facilitated by an API.
We're starting to see some movement in this area among collaboration and knowledge management vendors. There are also tentative steps from social sites like Ma.gnolia.
Let's also remember that this is personal. The relative importance of any given piece of information is different for you than it is for me. So this approach is especially important in our personal communications software, be that software a feed reader, an email client, or an service like Twitter.