Nptech is an attention stream!

In today's Boston Globe, Scott Krishner's "Are your feeds turning into too many long tails" reports on the Supernova Conference.   He says the meta-theme of the conference was the phenomenon that Linda Stone, a former executive at  Microsoft  and Apple, has dubbed ''continuous partial attention."     It is defined as: 

Continuous partial attention is that state most of us enter when we're in front of a computer screen, or trying to check out at the grocery store with a cellphone pressed to an ear -- or blogging the proceedings of a conference while it's underway. We're aware of several things at once, shifting our attention to whatever's most urgent -- perhaps the chime of incoming e-mail, or the beep that indicates the cellphone is low on juice. It's not a reflective state.

He also defines a few other terms, but one that I hadn't seen before is "Attention Stream," defined as:

A relatively new concept, an attention stream gathers all the content that shares the same tag, regardless of where it lives on the Internet, and presents it on the same page. For an event like Supernova, that might include photos and blog entries that have been tagged ''Supernova." It provides an impressionistic picture of what people are thinking and talking about, as well as what they're taking snapshots of.

Ah, so the nptech community is an attention stream!

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