Half the students (32 of 64) skipped the class and listened to the podcast only. The other half attended in person, where they also received a printed handout. A week later, the students were tested on the material.

Podcast Listeners Did Better

The students who downloaded the podcast alone averaged a C (71 out of 100) but those who attended class averaged a D. And those who listened to the podcast and took notes did even better - their average was 77.

Before university classrooms empty out, it's important to note that this is only preliminary research. McKinney's study involved only a single lecture. Also, motivation may have come into play as well. Her experiment didn't count for class credit, so students were encouraged to participate with iTunes gift cards. The high scorer from each group was awarded a $15 gift certificate for use in the online store.

McKinney now plans to further study podcasts in the classroom over the course of an entire semester, instead of just one class. She wonders if students might find podcasts more useful early on in a class, when the material is still new. Still, McKinney is a big believer in the power of technology and its impact on education. "I do think it's a tool," she says. "I think that these kids are programmed differently than kids 20 years ago."

PostRank looks at every item that comes through an RSS feed and scores it on a scale of 1 through 10 based on the number of comments it's received, inbound links, saves to del.cio.us, times it's been Tweeted and Dugg. The excitement comes in when the service delivers a filtered feed of just the 15% "most popular" items in that feed. It's a great way to pay casual attention to prolific feeds when you just want to see its own highlights.

Today the company is rolling out a slew of performance enhancements and new metrics including clickthroughs from its extensions, bookmarks in Ma.gnolia and mentions on microblogging service Pownce.

The company also rolled out a dedicated page for its very handy Google Reader extension - GReader users should check this one out.

We use AideRSS here at RWW every day and can't say enough about this simple but powerfully useful tool. We've written about it numerous times, including in the following particularly popular posts:

• Want That Post to Go Popular? Here's the Best and Worst Times to Post It


• What's Next on the Web: A ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008


• How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet


• Comparing Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche


• Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond


• Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your Feed Reader


• Why Gen Y is Going to Change the Web


• Five Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again


• An Ode to RSS On RSS Appreciation Day


• Why Online "Noise" is Good for You

It's true, we love AideRSS. It's just so incredibly useful we can't get over it. We wish the algorithm for determining popularity was more transparent and we hope that today's performance enhancements make a big difference - but we love it none the less. We'd love to see the folks at AideRSS connect with the good people at Gnip, a social media pinging service plus that we wrote about here.

The prospect of AideRSS's PostRank being rolled into other applications around the web is an exciting one. In what contexts would you like to see just the most popular items in an RSS feed?

Attention data, and its cousin sales data, is very important for companies because it allows them to personalize services to specific users. By looking at your past purchases, Amazon can make recommendations about new products you might like. By looking at what you've listened to, Last.fm and make recommendations about new musicians you might enjoy. Netflix can do the same with movie rentals, Facebook can do it with advertisements, Digg will soon do it with news, etc. But the question is: who owns that data?

"Intuitively, the information belongs to the consumer, but when we look into the details, things become less clear. We explicitly choose to use Amazon, to click and to buy things there," wrote Alex Iskold in August. "Everything we do is a two way street, since Amazon provides a service and we transact with it, it seems that they should have a right to the data as well."

Even today, on this blog, we made a call for a company to open data to users. Sarah Perez called out Facebook for their timid foray into lifestreaming that doesn't allow users to export their data out of the service. And she's right, of course. Facebook's new mini-feed service would be ten times more powerful and useful to users if it didn't just aggregate outside and on site data (which Facebook will undoubtedly mine for ad targeting purposes), but also let users take it back out.

However, does Facebook have an obligation to allow the portability of all user data on the site? Even if they didn't support data portability, whose data is it? Users generated it, but voluntarily (i.e., no one forces you to put any information on Facebook), so do those users have a right to demand it back?

Real World Data Portability

But even while the debate rages online about whether sites should be required to give users access to their data, there is a whole wealth of attention data that we're creating offline as well. Should we have access to that, too? What about every movie we've rented from Blockbuster? Every book we've checked out of the library? Our purchasing habits at Costco? How often and where we fill up our gas tanks? Even where our GPS systems take us or from where we're making cellular phone calls, to whom, and for how long are potentially trackable pieces of data.

Every time I make a purchase at my local CVS pharmacy, I swipe a discount card. I do it because I get coupons back for things I purchase, and CVS can tailor those coupons to me because it knows my purchasing habits. Should I be able to have access to that sales data as well? Should CVS let me bring my sales history to Walgreens and see what coupons Walgreens gives me? Of course, that option doesn't exist right now at either CVS or Walgreens -- but increasingly it does exist online, because we asked for it. So why not offline?

There is a ton of offline attention and sales data out there. If we're demanding access to that information online, shouldn't we ask for it offline as well?

Conclusion

The answer, in my opinion, is yes: we should be asking for it. But companies should be under no obligation to part with it -- offline or online. It is certainly a great bonus when a company gives you comprehensive access to your attention data in an easily exportable format. That has a lot of advantages for the consumer, and is probably a good idea long term for many companies as well. But our dealings with the services that collect this information are generally opt in. That is, if we don't want them collecting our data, we should simply walk away.

What do you think? Does real world data portability have any merit? Do you know of any "offline" companies that offer customers access to that sort of information already?

Information Overload

But while FriendFeed and similar services bring activity streams into a single place, making it easier to keep track of your friend's activity, there's still an overwhelming amount of activity for most of us to track. I follow just a handful of people on Twitter, and already the stream of activity is fast and furious. The same applies to the activity of my hundreds of friends on Facebook. Add into that activity from tens of other accounts and you can imagine how quickly an aggregated feed of your friends' activity can become overwhelming.

FriendFeed definitely does some things to alleviate the flow of information. For example, it groups similar items together -- i.e., rather than sending the 50 Flickr images that you just uploaded or the 50 tweets you just made at Twitter to your stream individually, it sends one or two with a link to the rest. FriendFeed also added search yesterday, which is a very useful feature allowing people to see what their friends are doing around specific topics across multiple networks.

FriendFeed tracks 28 services. Profilactic, another lifestreaming application, supports 155. Robert Scoble asked yesterday, how many services do we need? Good question. While FriendFeed certainly makes it easier to track your friends activity at all those services, it also exposes you to all of them. Before if you wanted to follow Joe on Twitter and Facebook, you followed him on Twitter and Facebook. If you follow him on FriendFeed, you also follow Joe on Flickr, and Netflix, and Amazon, and MySpace, and Pownce, and Digg, and YouTube, and every other service he might use. Yikes! (Note: there are some third party hacks to get around this.)

Adding To The Problem

Generally, FriendFeed highlights the problem of information overload, but it also has a hand in contributing to it. We all thought we were signing up for a social activity aggregator, but BAM!, turns out FriendFeed is a social network in its own right. FriendFeed encourages people to comment on items sent through its feeds on FriendFeed rather than on the source site. Some people think this is a killer feature that focuses conversations around all of our activity, while others think that it fragments conversations and could lead to redundancy as a result of "Social Network Switching Decay."

What it really might do is add to the noise. Lifestreaming services like FriendFeed that aggregate our social activity are supposed to be about making things simpler and lessening information overload -- not about adding to the flow of information.

What We Need

In an attention economy information overload is a serious concern. Services that can aggregate activity streams -- things that command a lot of our attention -- and make sorting through all that information easier are welcome. FriendFeed has the potential to be a very useful service in this area, but it needs a few tweaks, in my opinion.

First, it needs filters. As Fred Oliveira wrote, "If I already have Twitteriffic on, It makes sense to be able to filter out all Twitter bits from my friendfeed. If I’m in the mood for checking out photos from friends, I may want to see only photos on my friendfeed. If I’m looking for what my friends have been listening to on Last.fm, I might want to see only that."

Search was a good first step, but service and keyword based filters that give users more granular control over what sort of information is shown on their friends feed are a necessary next step. Filters could perhaps even be implemented on a friend-by-friend basis, and maybe automatic and weighted based on reading habits -- similar to Facebook's News Feed.

Filters would help us to actually reduce the amount of information we're tracking and remove noise from our feeds.

Second, FriendFeed needs to be a read/write service. Not in the way it is now, but by letting users write to the services they're pulling from. If I want to reply to a tweet, I don't want to do it on FriendFeed, I want to do it at the source: Twitter. Allowing me to do so from within FriendFeed would be awesome.

Third, FriendFeed needs an API (supposedly this is coming). While you shouldn't let your customers run your app, you should let your users define your application. Allowing developers to build on top of and extend the functionality of your application via mashups is often how good applications become killer applications. Without the ecosystem of awesome Twitter applications, for example, the service might not be nearly as fun to use and useful.

Conclusion

It is no wonder that FriendFeed has become the early breakout app of 2008. It has the potential to be truly useful, but right now it is doing more to highlight the problem of information overload -- and even add to it -- than it is to solve the problem. However, the promise of an application that can help us crawl out from under the constant stream of information that has inundated our lives is what makes FriendFeed, and similar services, so intriguing.

What do you think? Is FriendFeed a killer app as-is? Has it already helped your to cope with info overload? Let us know in the comments below, and be sure to vote in our poll.

Below is a copy of the map Shuttleworth came up with (click on the image for a full sized version):

Shuttleworth's diagram is probably not an uncommon view of information flow for many readers of this blog. And it's still not done: the map has a large "to-do" section.

To begin creating the map, Shuttleworth broke his online information flow up into twelve categories, events, text content, videos, photos, microblog content, bookmarks, web sites viewed, software used, lifecasting, location, comments, and blogroll. He also has a similar tree for content that originates on a mobile phone. That's a heck of a lot of things pulling at Shuttleworth's attention, but I'm willing to bet that it's a familiar situation for many of us.

The growing importance of attention is something we've often written about on this blog (see Alex Iskold's excellent overview of the attention economy), and there are a number of different approaches to how to deal with it. In the social media space, one of the approaches that is currently gaining steam, especially in the area of social networking, is data portability.

Data portability will allow users to theoretically mashup and interact with all of their social media information from a single place. While that won't cut down the number of sites and services tugging at our attention, it does promise to make managing that attention vastly easier. Shuttleworth points to services like Profilactic and Plaxo Pulse that are already attempting to bring our online social lives under a single umbrella.

"Overall, it was very helpful to see an overview of how my online information flows. I managed to get rid of some redundant channels along the way and am in a good position to consolidate and make sensible decisions about how to share information from now on," writes Shuttleworth on his blog, saying that the map also demonstrated how complex our online lives are.

Shuttleworth released the map on his blog as a pdf, png (graphic), mmap, or xmmap xml file, for anyone wishing to explore it further or use it as a basis for creating their own online information flow chart.