[Posted out of time] He doesn't know me...

...but Stowe Boyd sure knows how to kick my ... attention span. And I like it.

In high school, in an open field, with three old tennis balls I taught myself to juggle. Nothing fancy, just keeping three balls in motion. Then I tried to explain to my best friend Gary how to do it... Right there I ran into a brick wall. Here was something I could do but there was no way I could explain what I was doing. Sure, I could talk coherently about the mechanic that I employed. I could speak to the relative timing of events. I could describe the flowing pattern. I could not explain what it was that I was doing that allowed me to juggle.

Stowe Boyd ...

How do jugglers juggle? They don't focus on the balls, the movements, or timing. They unfocus: it is a field of all three dimensions and their attention is distributed. Good jugglers can also sing or tell jokes while juggling. Unfocus.

...and this is truly liberating... I thought I was just being rude...

In an era of flow you can ignore things that don't look threatening or critical. Important stuff will be signalled in a bunch of ways: critical breaking news stories will show in Twitter tweets, RSS, emails, IM. But you can just ignore transient stuff. That's why etiquette around IM has to be based on 'it's ok to ignore IMs' because otherwise it becomes a chore demanding foreground attention.

This will take a bit of Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching perspective to get my head around...

The network is mostly connections. The connections matter, give it value, not the nodes.