Attention
March 24, 2006
Meanwhile, the Real Attention Economy Chugs Along
This morning, I was thinking about people who read this blog and what I offer them that keeps them coming back. That led me into what I like to think of as the “real” attention economy—the one that’s already monetized.
Over the past few years, blogging has really taken off. A few days ago Doc Searls was pondering that he used to be in the Technorati Top 100 and now he’s not. Why? There’s all kinds of other stuff people are blogging about: “celebrities, politics, sex and other topics that float atop the polular mainstream media charts.” I’m at 3000 and something on the Technorati list, but still I get multiple tens of thousands of page views per month. Clearly, people at the top are getting a lot more.
Where were these people before? They were spending their time doing something and likely as not, someone, somewhere was deriving ad revenue or direct revenue from their attention. Now that that attention has shifted, so has some of the money. I say “some of” because not all blogs are monetized. I doubt that there’s a one-to-one correlation between the shift in attention and a shift in money.
On my bike ride this afternoon, I was thinking about Dave Winer retiring from blogging. I doubt he really wants to give up the attention and influence that blogging gives him. I’ll bet he’s got ideas on how to influence the tech world in some other way. It will be interesting to watch.
Overall, I think the shift in attention is good. When I was at Excite, we could “drive” 5000 sign-ups a day for services we put on the home page. In that world, the world that Yahoo!, CNN, and a few other highly monetized, high-traffic sites live in, a few people control how the attention is directed and they’re clearly directing it with the purpose of filling their coffers. Sometimes, as Jon points out, they lose sight of why people visit their sites. The rise of the blog world has distributed part of that decision among thousands of blogs and that can only be good.
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March 08, 2006
Michael Goldhaber on the Real Nature of the Attention Economy (ETech 2006)
Michael Goldhaber is speaking on the real nature of the attention economy. Michael’s been working on a book about attention on this subject since the 1990’s. He thinks that this conference has its feet in two paradigms: the attention economy and the old economy. “You all don’t know what world you’re in. You’re like butterflies that think your caterpillars.” Attention is a different way of being.
Michael sees attention as a new level in the massively multiplayer game known as western culture. The economy is a single level game, but economic history is a multilevel game. The first level was the feudal economy (800-1200). The economy ran on winnings through fighting, by becoming a vassal of some other Lord, and marriage.
The second level emerged out of feudalism. This was the market-money-industrial (MMI) system that ran from 1650-1980. That gap was the transition period.
Michael views the next level as the attention economy. This is a completely new level; a new kind of system. You can’t describe the stock market in terms of feudal society. Neither can you describe the attention economy in terms of MMI.
Each level has new rules, roles, goals, and moves. New levels emerge from basic human proclivities and a whole list of other things that I couldn’t type in fast enough.
Going from feudal to MMI happened because Western Europe was secure. The openings for the change were ungoverned cityspaces, safe travel, and mostly no slavery. The feudal system lacked material goods.
Going from MI to Attention can happen because of material abundance. The openings were large high schools, broadcasting, publishing, and the Internet.
The goals have changed from loyalty to material goods to attention The roles have changed from knights to owners to stars and fans.
What is attention? Attention is scarce and always will be. It is very desirable. Paying attention is a complex thing and includes a broad range from hearing to obeying, to remembering. Paying attention means you allow someone else to shape how your mind works.
Attention isn’t just about time. There’s an intensity component. If you pay attention to someone, that person owns part of your attention and will continue with you until you go senile.
We can think of owning a little piece of property in the minds of people who have paid attention to you. Finding meaning in life comes from sharing meanings with others. This can only happen if you get some of their attention.
Being productive means being able to increase the amount of attention one gets.
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Jon Udell on Seeking Attention (ETech 2006)
Jon Udell is the morning’s opening keynote. We are all seekers of attention. We all have ideas we’d like to promote and agendas we’d like to publicize. So, we all make claims on other people’s attention. The focus of his talk is how to reward those who give us attention. Jon sees for patterns.
First patterns is what Jon calls “Heads, Decks, and Leads.” An idea from the world of “dead trees” these give users information about context switches because they’re hard and time consuming.
Writing good titles, naming things, is hard because there’s a cognitive dissonance in trying to see what we’re doing from the reader or listener’s perspective. He gives an example from a blog post that shows up nice in the browser and in an aggregator, but not in the search research because Google only sees the document title and many blogs don’t put the article title in the title box.
You see similar problems with search results that don’t show author and dates. Jon recommends structuring document titles on the Web so that they contain information a searcher would like to know to make a decision. He shows a screencast of search results from things on IDG that has expanders that show you more information about the result on demand.
Jon’s pet peeve is message titles in discussion threads. Threading is based on titles in many cases, so the technology reinforces repeating the title over and over and not giving searchers good information about the message contents.
The second pattern is active contexts. One example of an active context is what Jon calls “active collections.” Active collections is the idea of collecting together all the related information about a resource, including tags, related documents, etc. and giving it a name. Active collections are future proofed because what you hand back to represent the active collection is a URL representing a query.
He shows another example of an active context. He’s linked his Amazon wishlist to his library lookup project. He went further and hacked GreaseMonkey to modify Amazon so that whenever he looks at a book, a link shows up if that book is available at his local library. Clicking on the link takes him to that library lookup.
Another example is a slider at wikipedia that allows you to show changes and move through time by moving the slider. That’s a big help for people who read diffs for a living.
A third pattern is canonical names. Names like “podcast” and “AJAX” show the power of names. URLs are another great example. ISBNs are an example of names that lack an important property. Each version of a book (hardcover, paperback) has a different ISBN without knowing what class they belong to. There’s a service that maps an ISBN to the class it belongs to. Another example is the IT Conversations audio clipping service.
A fourth pattern is multimedia storytelling. We’re natural story tellers. He uses the example of retrieving information about a particular audio clip by remembering how far he was on his run. Jon mentions the ACLU pizza ordering video and how it was incredibly viral and actually peaked before the technology community became aware of it. Another example is the iPod packaging spoof. As technologists, we need to be more aware of the power of these kinds of powerful stories to get our message out.
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March 07, 2006
Linda Stone on Attention
Linda Stone, speaking on Attention as the Real Aphrodisiac asks the audience these questions:
- I always pay attention
- I pay partial attention
- The way I use technology improves my quality of life
- Technology compromises the way I live my life
- Technology sets me free
- Technology enslves me
Continuous partial attention (CPA) is a phrase Linda coined to describe the way people live in the world of high-tech. It’s an adaptive behavior. We’re on our way toa dapting beyond it. CPA has been a way of life for many. It’s a post multi-tasking approach. In multi-tasking, we give the same priority to much of what we do. We get as many things done as we can.
In the case of CPA, we’re not motivated by getting things done. We’re motivated by getting noticed, connecting with others, scanning for opportunities, at any given moment. There used to be a time when people wouldn’t consider picking up a phone during lunch, but now it’s commonplace. You go to lunch and you spend it witnessing each other’s phone calls. We’ve stretched out attention bandwidth to it’s upper limits.
We operate with a collective sense of ideals and values. In the era from 1965 to 1985 the collective ideal was all about “me” and “self expression.” We began yearning for a connection to others. From 1985 to 2005, we lived in the era of connecting. The network was the center of gravity. We moved from valuing productivity to valuing connecting. We went from creating opportunity to scanning for opprotunities.
The 24/7 thing isn’t feeling so good. One CEO demanded that people disarm when they come in. Other’s have different types of meetings. Informational meetings are OK for CPA, but decisions meetings require no distractions. How many of the 500 emails you get a day are urgent (a tiger). The CPA lifestyle is becoming overwhelming.
Everything in nature has a cycle. There are periods of training, periods of rest. If there is no winter, there is no spring. At the moment, we use every technology at our disposal to communicate and to be communicated with. Email is not very effective for decision making and crisis management. But we’re still trying. We have to opportunity to come up with new strategies.
Conflict resolution is best done synchronous and with high bandwidth. Crisis management demands synchornous communication at any bandwidth. Email is an attention “chipper shredder.” It is a dangerous tool that should come with instructions on how to use it safely.
We’re on the edge of the next shift. “Connect, connect, connect” brought us to the place where we’re overwhelmed and unprotected. We want protection and security. We’re moving into an era that’s all about discerning opportunity. We want to sort through noise to find signal. iPods are as much about protection as they are about choice (that’s why I use one on airplanes).
Discerning opportunity: what do we really need? what do we pay attention to? Ease of use has been the mantra of everyone and that’s good, but it’s no longer good enough. The new mantra, the new differentiator is “does this product or service improve quality of life?” That’s the only way to differentiate going forward. Does it help protect, filter, create a meaningful relationship going forward?
Quoting Dee Hock, Linda talks about how information becomes knowledge when it’s integrated with other information. Knowlege becomes understanding when it’s useful for making decisions. The knew opportunity is to move from being knowledge workers to being uderstanding and wisdom workers.
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Sifry on the Attention Economy
Dave Sifry of Technorati is speaking on The Economy of Attention. What are the rules that guide the attention economy and how are they different than the rules we’re used to in the real economy. Attention is about time directed to a purpose by people.
Most economic models focus on what is scarce in the system. Economic systems aren’t only defined by what is scarce, but it’s a pretty good tool to find the seams in the fabric of the economy.
In the attention economy, computing power, storage, network bandwidth, and even money aren’t scarce. Time is what even people like Bill Gates don’t have enough of. We have a finite supply. What else is scare? Not information. Social connections to people are hard to scale.
We can’t create time and we can’t hoard it. Its a perishable item. Aggregating attention artifacts (where I spend my time, on what activities, and for what purpose) is valuable. Yahoo! and Google value their clickstreams because it gives them insight. Create attention data is easy. Just live your life and the data can be capture. Explicit metadata also adds value (tagging, as an example).
One of the most beautiful words in economics is productivity. This gives you leverage over the raw inputs. Productivity grows an economy without expending any new material. How can attention increase productivity? Technorati was Dave’s effort to help him save a lot of his own time by giving him what he wanted when he wanted it.
How can this be applied?
- Incorporate an understanding of time and people deeply into the design of applications. He uses tech.memeorandum.org as an example.
- Attention is both a currency and a perishable. Make it easy to create and express attention.
- Hyperlinks are votes of attention (Steve Gillmor disagrees with this, I think).
- Look to create opportunities for economies of scale in participation.
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Seth Goldstien: Attention Broker (ETech 2006)
Seth Goldstein is talking about Root Markets: Applications for the New Attention Economy. Root is an attention exchange. Is attention about money or time? Seth jokes that he’s from New York and so he focuses on the money aspect of attention, leaving the time aspect to folks from San Francisco.
Is attention a privacy challenge or publicity opportunity. Sharing your attention (ala last.fm, for example). The best guarantee for attention is living your life as open as possible, as public as possible. Receiving attention makes you influential. This can occur even when you’re not there (even dead).
Web services have enabled to recording of attention data in real time. Root is an open exchange for attention. He defines “PPA” as the promise to pay attention. Putting something on a calendar is an example of a PPA. PPAs form attention bonds. When you promise to attend an event, like your son’s soccer game, you are creating an attention bond. Failing to deliver impacts your reputation.
Why is this relative to Wall Street? You can secure and trade PPAs. He makes an analogy to the commercial mortgage market. This turns mortgage payment promises into a trillion dollar market.
Your attention is valuable. As an impression, it’s worth $0.001. For a click it’s $0.50. For a mortgage lead, it’s $25. An completed US Army application is worth $2000. We pay attention to lots of things. We’d like to keep our attention from distraction, companies, advertisements, flashing banners, strangers, etc. These interruptions are stealing your attention.
Who owns your attention? You do. He then turns this into a discussion of how you own your attention data. I don’t think the logic necessarily follows. He acknowledges that clearly your records on Amazon belong to Amazon and you together. The question is do you have the right to make Amazon give you that data in a form you can use?
Root gives you a dashboard of where you’re spending your time and where you click online. This is the start. You can share your attention data with others. This gives you a comparison of your attention and other people’s attention. This gives the ability to form communities around common attention patterns. Most important, the delete button let’s you delete your attention data from Root.