I am of the belief that most people will take legal approaches to purchase goods or services if they are provided at acceptable market rates and are readily available. Only when market conditions are so out of whack with public perception, combined with free or near-free alternatives, do you see a dramatic uprising of illegal activity - as the public essentially revolts against the inflexible market makers.

But while most people are law abiding honest folks, there are of course exceptions who will flaunt the law because they can and feel the sheer capability they have to do so means they must. In the world of Peer To Peer (P2P), this has no doubt been the case. For every cash-poor college student trying to get the latest Green Day album off Napster, you may have others bootlegging new releases filmed in the theater on a handicam. And for the most part, both the college student and the video voyeur know what they are doing is "wrong", and there's also no doubt the networks they used were fully aware and supportive of said bad activity.

Napster kicked off the P2P digital music revolution, followed by many others in its wake, from Kazaa to Gnutella, BearShare, eDonkey, LimeWire and others. While the RIAA and its ilk moved to respond like drunken Neanderthals to shut down the users and its networks, many of them have eventually fallen. The latest to give up the ghost is LimeWire, who fell under a court-ordered injunction and was forced to stop supporting its file sharing software.

This is not news to those of you who are RSS addicts, like myself. But as someone who had previously downloaded the software, used as a backup if the TiVo failed, I got a note from them via e-mail today reporting the shutdown and ominously stating:

"DOWNLOADING OR SHARING COPYRIGHTED CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION IS ILLEGAL."

Well, duh.

It's not as if the company didn't know exactly what it was getting into when it launched and supported its service. It wasn't as if it was naive enough to think its users were sharing PG-rated photos and freeware software. P2P networks like LimeWire are rife with dark content. So I have to smirk at the stark reminder that essentially states the obvious. Illegal things are illegal. They always have been. Just because software and technology makes it possible doesn't change the rules.

Google is said to have one of the most valuable brands in the world, leading annual reports with the likes of Wal*Mart, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and others. The brand is pervasive, and represents much more than its initial search roots. Recently, the company opened up a retail store on its campus that features the Google logo (and its many sub-brands, like YouTube, Android and Blogger) on scads of merchandise. Now, if you want to wear Google apparel like the company's employees, without having to pass a rigorous set of interviews, you can just walk in and gain official geek cred.

The company has quietly had an online store for years. It's where I purchased a black Google beanbag (like the real ones on campus) and the Google onesies Matthew and Sarah sported when they were only a few months old. Now, the online experience has made it to the physical world, on the Google campus itself.

In the 2000 Charleston Road building, commonly referred to as "2000 Alza" thanks to Alza Pharmaceuticals (purchased by Johnson and Johnson) previously occupying the space, on the ground floor, you can now purchase Google shirts, pens, flying discs, mugs, fleece jackets, and much more. Just like the Apple campus can let you pledge allegiance to Cupertino at their main campus with Apple wear, Google now lets you do the same.

The 2000 Alza building is already among the most interesting on campus, so far as I am concerned. It houses the Buzz team and other consumer-facing products. But while the lobby used to be a quiet place where engineers could have one on one discussions, I found the lobby swarming with gadget seekers today, and a line with dozens of customers looking to sport the Google logo.

I took a quick intro video of what's offered, embedded below.


If you think I left empty handed, of course you would be wrong. With Fall here, and Winter on its way, Matthew and Sarah now have a YouTube and Google jacket respectively, which they took to the park this evening. So if you are near Google campus, or just want to fill your home with Google outside your computer, you now have a place to go.

One more thing - still no Google watches, so I continue to wear my Apple watches every day, adequately spreading my allegiances. I even asked at the front counter, but they simply don't have them.

More people are creating more content of more types and sharing it with more connections in more places than ever before - not just text, but photos, audio and video as well. Every second of every day comes with more opportunities to be off task, distracted, and interrupted - with something new fighting for your attention. It might be the arrival of new e-mail, or a new RSS feed, a bombardment of new tweets, a text, or a push notification, but the interruptions are increasing - forcing you to make a choice oh where to put your attention and how to use your time.

A never-ending stream of updates on your favorite social networking sites may be full of interesting links to check out from your friends, with photos of where they are that day, and location updates telling you exactly what they were doing.

You are likely being bombarded with new demands on your time and your attention that weren't there last year, and if you were one of the elite few who had opted in to this interruption firehose a year or so ago, there is no doubt the velocity is stronger than ever, and there is no end in sight - for the tap continues to be opened.

You Are Constantly Optimizing Your Streams for Relevance

As this firehose of information sprays forth, you might think it is simply an increase in noise - that the same amount of information relevant to you today is the same amount that was relevant to you months ago, years ago. But it's not true - because as humans, we are catering all our streams to our own interests. Consciously or subconsciously, we are making deliberate choices to connect to the "right" people, to follow the "right" sites, to opt into the "right" discussions, to engage in the "right" e-mail threads, and to click on links that we believe are relevant for what we want to discover or how we want to be entertained. So this noise, even if it is still noise, is getting honed and massaged - and it is increasing the relevant signal in an ever mounting shriek, like the whistled warning of an oncoming freight train.

This combination - the dramatic increase in consumable content and diversity of sources, along with the human desire to be connected to the "right" people and "right" subject matter - practically ensures that the increase in personally relevant information is growing, if not in an exponential way, a linear way.

Simply put, the total number of personally relevant pieces of content to consume each day is much higher than it was 1 year or 2 years ago, and will likely be 5 to 10 times higher 2 years down the road.

We need to find ways to handle this deluge.

Early Adopters Showing Signs of Early Fatigue?

For those of us who are digitally connected and active, we are feeling this in acute fashion. Despite improved software tools to help us accomplish tasks, practically all of us feel we are busier than we were last year, and the year prior. We feel there are more tasks that need completing, and that we are actually falling further behind. And we are constantly being interrupted - our every task seeing its schedule hole punched like swiss cheese, as one turns to each incoming beep on the smartphone or software alert that indicates there are new messages in front of us that quite possibly could demand our attention - now.

As humans, the way we are dealing with this onslaught of personally relevant information manifests itself in a few visible ways. Some of us feel as if we are suffering from constant short term memory loss. We can't answer questions about shows we have seen or blog posts we may have read. We may scrunch up our face and look quizzically as friends remind us of updates they may have seen on social sites that they swear we saw, but we can't remember.

Social Gestures A Shortcut to Save Time and Move On

For those of us who once may have been active blog commenters across a wide variety of sites, we are commenting less, and when we do, we are usually writing shorter comments. The two big exceptions to total comments, of course, are Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which forces brevity - it's practically the iPod Nano of the writing craft. In exchange for our once lengthy and on-topic discussions, we are taking shortcuts. We might simply be clicking a "like" button to signal we saw the content and approved of it. We might want to toss a bread crumb of a social gesture the author's way - to share it, to retweet it, and move along quickly to the next thing, because there's always something bigger and better to take our attention away around the corner.

The very time we take to consume the media we're handed is like being passed a ticking time bomb. If something is deemed too long, or isn't immediately rewarding, we might just close our window, or decide to TL;DR the whole thing. There's even a Web site for that very purpose now.

There Is No Off Button. Ever.

The attention crisis is with us at all times and in all places. It is clear. No longer can we simply turn off our computer screens and relax with a good book, or a magazine, or see our favorite show, and avoid interruption. For at the same time, our smartphones are in a state of constant connectivity. They beep and chirp to let us know of new e-mail, new text messages, new phone calls, or even chat pings from Google Talk. They practically beg to be held and coddled at every moment, as we practice partial attention - holding the phone or laptop with the TV or radio on the in background. We glance down at our phones at stop lights or in traffic to see the latest Twitter mentions or if any of the newest e-mails require immediate action, because we fear both being out of touch and falling even further behind than we know we already are.

So what is being done? There has to be a breaking point, at which people's unfinished projects and mediocre work products, the result of constant interruptions, distractions, and scraping under the deadline, red eyed and fatigued, take their toll. There will need to be a trade off, either through the recognition that something will be missed, something will not be finished, or that we need to turn to a higher power, to artificial intelligence to help us surface the best and to ignore the rest. We cannot any longer rely solely on our ability to read fast, process fast and decide fast, to blast through the day's content and come out the other side fully intact. And if we are superhuman and still swear that this is possible, the demands will be even more difficult in coming months and years.

Information overload is passé. It's truly not an issue of too much information in general - but moreso an issue of too much relevant information and our inability to filter out the noise automatically to get to the good stuff every single time. Therein lies the opportunity - the opportunity to fight the attention crisis head-on. Whoever gets this right, whoever can help you to eliminate the crisis, to find the best stuff, always, and treat you like an individual, not just a clone of people like you, wins. And if you know it or not, you are already winning, because there is more relevant content than ever. Can you become superhuman and get it all?

One more thing. How many times were you interrupted in reading this post?

Apple's announcement this morning of a Mac App Store, part of OS X 10.7 Lion starting next year, and for 10.6 users as soon as 90 days from now, spells another nail in the coffin for the retail box model of software discovery, purchase and installation. Just as iTunes, Napster and the many other Web-based entertainment delivery models dramatically impacted the retail experience of physically purchasing (or renting) CDs and DVDs, so too will the software industry be impacted by an increased emphasis on Web delivery of applications. Apple has woken up to this trajectory with today's announcement, after years of focusing their app store on mobile devices, while at the same time, Google continues to march down its path of a Chrome Web store for the company's planned OS.

The concept of an iTunes-like software delivery method for purchasing is hardly groundbreaking. Back in 2007, more than three years ago, I was begging for it in a piece I had posted to The Apple Blog (Solving Software Purchases the iTunes Way). At the time, I talked about the benefits of reviews, demos and one-click purchasing for all types of software, and those benefits are a big part of the promised Mac App Store. Interestingly, at the time of my post, Apple had only focused on media with iTunes. The iTunes App Store came out a full year later, and it has taken two more years to bring this delivery method to standard software.

In the last three years, a few major developments have taken place to make this promise more of a reality - including increased access to high speed broadband, required for large downloads, much like with movie rentals and purchases, once deemed nearly impossible, and the gradual doing away with optical drives, which Apple seems to be allergic to in the same way they ditched floppy disks back in 1998 with the first generation iMac.

On my MacBook Air, if I can avoid hooking up the USB SuperDrive, I will do it. I downloaded my Adobe Photoshop suite from the Web, and want all my data to flow through the air. If I ever were to consider Google's Chrome OS, the process would no doubt be the same - only with the browser being the center of the universe, not an iTunes like product.

Interestingly, much of Apple's event this morning was taken up talking about the latest edition of iLife, the consumer products focused on rich media, from photos to video and music creation. First, those apps and their data take up a lot of space, possibly forcing folks to consider backup outside their smaller SSD drives, and second, highlighting how unlikely it is that I will be purchasing iLife from an Apple Retail store in a boxed version. If Apple hasn't yet said that all software installs are going to come from the Mac App store, there will definitely be a push that direction. I already don't want to upgrade from my current version of iLife to iLife '09, simply because there's no way to update over the Web.

Many of us have faster pipes. Many of us are using our DVD and CD drives less and less - if at all. The Web is replacing all these things, and Apple is making a centralized place for us to have fast access, and for them to no doubt make lots more money than they already do - grabbing 30 percent of the pie. It's an aggressive move for them on the balance sheet, one more piece of their "integrated" approach, but the right one and the obvious one. Google's Chrome Web store too is obvious, and exciting for its own right, giving the option for Web services providers to charge for apps that might otherwise be free. As a consumer, I am ready to pay real money for good programs. Just don't make me buy them at retail on a spinning disk.