Interesting Tidbits for November 18th through November 19th

Things worth reading for November 18th through November 19th:

• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Multitasking and Continuous Partial Attention: An Interview with Linda Stone (Part One) – Important Interview with two of my favorite thinkers: Linda Stone and Henry Jenkins. "In 1997, I coined the phrase Continuous Partial Attention (Harvard Business Review, January 2007) to describe what I observed in the world around me, at Microsoft where I was a researcher and later a Vice President, with customers, and at NYU where I was adjunct faculty in a graduate program. We all seemed to be paying partial attention – continuously. NYU students had their screens tiled to display multiple instant messaging windows, email, WORD documents, and more. My colleagues in high technology did their best to give the appearance of paying attention to a conversation, all the while, also attending to caller I.D., Tetris and BrickOut on their cell phones, and other people in range. Every stray input was a firefly. And every firefly was examined to determine if it burned more brightly than the one in hand."
• Orb TV Pushes Into the Living Room – NYTimes.com – Unlike Pogue and Mossberg on Google TV, Nick Bilton likes Orb TV quite a bit: "There is a new contender in the the digital living room called Orb TV which can stream content from Hulu and other online services directly to a television.<br />
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  "The new gadget, which look like a thick pancake, plugs directly into a television through standard cables and streams content to the TV via a computer running free Orb software, called Orb Caster. The software acts like a personal content control tower."
• Google TV’s Chaotic Interface – David Pogue – NYTimes.com – Like Walt Mossberg, Pogue is unimpressed with Google TV: "This much is clear: Google TV may be interesting to technophiles, but it’s not for average people. On the great timeline of television history, Google TV takes an enormous step in the wrong direction: toward complexity."
• Wandering Mind Is a Sign of Unhappiness – NYTimes.com – "Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing."
• Will Focus Make You Happier? – Edward Hallowell – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review – "As an expert on ways to achieve peak performance as well as expert on attention deficit disorder (A.D.D.) and the crazy busy pace of modern life, this study caught my eye. So…unless we're having sex, half of us at any given moment are not focused on what we're doing. Not only does such lack of focus lead to unhappiness, it also leads to errors, wasted time, miscommunication and misunderstanding, diminished productivity, and who-knows-how-much global loss of income (there'll be a study on that soon, no doubt).<br />
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  "All of which cries out the question, why such rampant lack of focus? And what remedies can we apply?"
• Mary Meeker’s State Of The Web And Disruptive Innovation – PSFK – PSFK usefully zeroes in on one of the best features of Mary Meeker's always-provocative Web 2.0 presentation from earlier this week.
• Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places – Harvard Business Review – "Consumers still want a clear brand promise and offerings they value. What has changed is when—at what touch points—they are most open to influence, and how you can interact with them at those points. In the past, marketing strategies that put the lion’s share of resources into building brand awareness and then opening wallets at the point of purchase worked pretty well. But touch points have changed in both number and nature, requiring a major adjustment to realign marketers’ strategy and budgets with where consumers are actually spending their time."