Scott Wilson's Metaphors

met Scott Wilson yesterday in Innsbruck. funny that he was here (merely by accident), because the ideas about micro-attention design were so similar. his brilliant FeedForward project basically is a personal RSS feed-mixer, a desktop client (but), as opposed to other RSS client's mailbox'n'files-paradigm.

best thing yesterday was Scott's virtuosity in thinking in metaphors for microcontent circulation and ambient microcontent flow experience. alas, i remember only parts: misguided unremarkable trunks circulating on an airport luggage line, with lots of interesting tags from airports all over the world. Sigurd Rinde's (in fact: Jyri Engeström's) beachball thrown into some congregation, a social object carrying the tracks of where & when (and by whom) it has been bounced. (Sigurd's www.thingamy.com is an intersting business plan builder software: demo.)

there was the idea of enhancing the basically empty new "Learning Spaces" built into new university architectures in UK with adaptable collective "interesting-stuff-in-looped-microcontent-channels"-feeds (the newest or highest rated items collectively tagged with "attention", for example).

so if FeedForward (newest version) is a mixer (claim is "Remix Your Information Environment"), the MicroPulse (bad name, just placeholder) will have to be a sort of ambient transistor "radio" with all sorts of channels (based on tags) where content items run in loops, just "being there" (which means you don't have to fear to miss something). (Hey, a FeedFoward blog post mentioned the radio metaphor the day before yesterday! and, of course, there was Radio Userland.) of course the MicroRadio cannot manage all of the interesting feed items. it is a secondary tool: looping microcontent after it has been clipped and filtered through e.g. delicious, microblogging, digg etc., or a similar proprietary authoring tool. i always idiosyncratically dream of using TiddlySnip here somehow.