March 09, 2006
At ZDNet Dan Farber posted one the ETech 2006 conference whose theme is "the attention economy."
He said this:
"During the sessions, several presenters attempted to wrestle the notion of attention to the ground. It was clear that definition and articulation of attention was not uniformly focused. Much of the talk was theoretical, aspirational, or about monetizing user attention. I’m just looking for ways to manage my attention—how I filter the inflowing bits, based on some implicit and explicit goals and chance occurrence."
Seth Goldstein tried to explain something he called PPA (Promise to Pay Attention), or attention bonds.
He explained it this way:
“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. A completed US Army application is worth $2,000. 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.”
“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. A completed US Army application is worth $2,000. 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.”
Michael Goldhaber added to the mix by saying that, “Attention is scarce, and it always will be.” It’s also desirable.
He went on to add “Attention is not about time,” in contrast. “The intensity of attention is what counts,” he said. “We can think of attention as owning a kind of property, located in the minds of those who have paid you attention. Meaning is important, and finding meaning in life comes from sharing meanings with each other. It can only happen if you get some of their attention.”
In listening to Doc Searls comment, someone finally said something that made a little sense.
"The Cluetrain [intention economy] will finally arrive when customers are fully empowered in the marketplace and no longer have to go from silo to silo looking for the best deal, trudging through a snow storm of messages they don’t want to hear." I think we can all heartily agree with that statement.
Historian George Dyson talks on how Google's search engine is an attention engine: "Google allows the users to behave like neurons in the sense of making the links. It's an amazing execution of how it is done. Digitize everything, index it and let people leave trails through it. In 20 or 30 years people will have linked the meaning between things in the way the brain works–there is no language or code in the brain."
This is a strange conference as I go through what they are saying and trying to discribe. Many of the presenters seem to be struggling to to even define what it is they are saying or why.
It seems that they are trying to prove too much; trying to unveil something that is pretty much already here, but using different language to describe it.
Doc Searls said it simply in that all of this is dealing with the time it takes for people to sift throught all the clutter to find the thing they need. When we learn how to develop systems to eliminate that, it is there that we will have arrived. Simply said and understood.
