ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

ONE GREAT IDEA that I took away from Nexus 2007 is what Nathan Torkington (O’Reilly) calls Continous Partial Attention. Not that the phenomenon is new, but because it describes succinctly what I’ve been (and still am) experiencing. Finally, I can name it.

This is a new design challenge in this age of information anxiety and abundance of meaning. More and more people, myself included, are doing many things at the same time. However, decades of research (and common sense) have indicated that the quality of one’s output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks. For example:

• “We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can,” says René Marois, neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, quoted in a recent NYTimes piece about how multi-taskers max out their brains, creating neural network bottlenecks and causing confusion and mistakes (thanks, Susan Mernit).
• When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer–often double the time or more–to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan: “The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large–amazingly so.” (thanks, DeedsDoing 2006)
• “Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren’t going to do well in the long run,” says Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, quoted in a CNN report last year.

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FIRST, Sister Judith Zoebelein, editorial director of the Vatican website, was interviewed by Robert Scoble and friends at the recent LIFT conference in Feb. They discussed the relevance and challenges of using Web technologies for a 2000-ish-year-old organization like the Catholic Church.

SECOND, the Podcast Awards for 2006 are out. Among the winners are three Catholic podcasts: Read the rest of this entry »

THIS IS A REACTABLE, a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Looks futuristic, tactile and based on physics laws. (Thanks to Chris Sessums’ post on this.)

According to the designers, this instrument is intended to be:

• collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
• intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
• sonically challenging and interesting
• learnable and masterable, even by children
• suitable for novice and advanced electronic music (i.e. installations and concerts)

Here’s a podcast on the “who” and “how” questions of podcasting from The Podcast Academy (a sister channel of IT Conversations):

Curious about who’s listening to podcasts in general, or do you need to know who your particular audience is so that you can attract the right sponsors? The panel fields questions such as: Who are the listeners in categories of age, education, gender, and location? How much are podcasts being used for learning? How much for corporate purposes? These panelists discuss the latest metrics on who’s listening and who’s producing podcasts, plus offer creative ways of getting to the numbers behind your podcast.