We are all seekers of attention – we all have ideas we want to promote. To that end we make claims on other people’s attention – how can we reward that attention?
There are sets of patterns here – four patterns:
1 – heads, decks, and leads
The information architecture of newspapers – give people the ability to scan what you’re presenting at multiple levels of detail and work their way into the material.
It’s hard to write titles – or name anything. There’s a cognitive dissonance between our objective sense of what we’re about and what we project – we think people can read our minds, so why should we have to externalize ourselves?
What do you present the world in search results, for example? He shows an example of Google where the search results from a blog only shows the name of the blog instead of the title of the entry. Put richer metadata in titles.
The tragedy of discussion threads – a huge amount of collaboration goes on in mailing lists, and the title gets repeated on every message on a thread – what would it be like if discussion threads had titles that told a story? You could get a sense of the discussion from reading the titles. But it breaks the threading!
2 – active context
A new pattern: What do you know about a topic? The answer is most frequently a set of URLs. An active resource collection. A bunch of effects can happen – what tags are related, who are other people with this interest. Scoping is interesting – right now there’s me and the world, but not yet let me see stuff by my trust circle.
Active collection is futureproofed in an interesting way. Used to put together a set of things in a list, but now send a url, which in some sense is a promise to keep updating. The token you hand someone is actually a query.
We can help people visualize what’s changing in complex information environments – e.g. walking through the history of a wikipedia page.
3 – canonical names
OCLC ISBN relationship mapping as a mapping of relationships.
Soundbites in IT conversations – can create a url that is a specific time snippet from media resources.
4 – multimedia storytelling
Storytelling is what we do as a tribe. The ability to remember information we’ve gotten from listening or viewing by where it happened in time is profound.
Oren Sreebny 