It has been 2 weeks since I wrote my first post on dealing with the large volumes of information coming at me through my rss feeds. I have been using Attensa to see whether this would solve my problems. Now its time to try Touchstone, one of the other products that tries to deal with attention management.

First though, how did Attensa go? There were problems initially with the beta – but I had a great response from the Attensa support team who worked with me to try and solve the problems. We got it working in the end, though not yet perfectly – it crashes outlook after several hours of having Outlook open and I cannot have it in my Exchange mailbox – but both of these will hopefully be solved in the next release, though unfortunately I do not have a timeline on when this will be 🙁

It was very interesting to use Attensa though – I definitely read different posts as a result of using the software. I would be interested to know more about how the prioritisation worked. I still found myself jumping down to posts that I knew were there but had been placed lower down the list somewhere. It definitely was more efficient than before however. There were several negatives that can really be expected at this early point in development so hopefully will improve over time (?):

– it seems to prioritise by feed and not post which was a shame.
– rss feeds that post more often were given a higher priority even if I read every post from those that post less often
– the ability to prioritise (or otherwise) keywords manually

Anyhow, the software was easy to use once I got it set up though scrolling with the mouse wheel in the river of news view is impossible (it jumps half a page at a time). Right now if the other attention management applications are not better I would still use Attensa over other readers.

So onto some good news 🙂 Touchstone emailed me giving me an invite to test the software. I almost missed it as for some reason gmail decided their emails were worthy of my junk folder! I am not sure why really. Certainly, nothing stood out from the emails as a reason why this would happen.

[update] touchstone rebranded to particls