attention - Michael Becker on Diigo

19 Mar 09

Twitter as Flashpoint for the Attention Economy

Critic Andrew Keen says Twitter is the start of the attention economy, and that quantifying the value of attention will be the new ballgame in the post-Web 2.0 world.

www.internetevolution.com/author.asp - Preview

web2.0 web3.0 attention andrewkeen internet economy of attention economy Jason Calcanis Twitter twitter-presentation

Twitter's ascent marks the end of the Web 2.0 period (1999-2009) and the beginning of what I would call, without any originality, the "attention economy."
Calacanis presented Twitter with a highly viable business model for the new attention economy. What he was doing, of course, was quantifying the value of attention. Calacanis was telling Twitter that an exclusive position on the network had an annual value to him of $125,000.
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- Imagine Twitter creating a two-tiered system in which its 100 leading celebrities paid $500,000 a year for the privilege of appearing above the fold on the sign-in page for new users. Then imagine that all power users with more than 10,000 followers had to pay Twitter an annual maintenance fee of $1,000 (a veritable bargain at less than 10 cents per follower per year). Now wouldn’t that be a radically more innovative business model than trying to sell advertisements and sponsorships?

25 Jan 09

Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing.

www.locusmag.com/...octorow-writing-in-age-of.html - Preview

Cory Doctorow Locus Online attention writing internet Web productivity

The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing.
But the Internet has been very good to me. It's informed my creativity and aesthetics, it's benefited me professionally and personally, and for every moment it steals, it gives back a hundred delights. I'd no sooner give it up than I'd give up fiction or any other pleasurable vice.
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- It's not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it's entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes.
- When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web.
- It's nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time.
- Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, "correcting" your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on.
- By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it's needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant "DISTRACT ME" sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.

19 Jan 09

RSS Overload: Don't Complain, Do Something About It

Louis Gray urges those of us feeling overwhelmed by the number of unread items in our RSS inboxes to take action and week out the non-hackers.

www.louisgray.com/...ont-complain-do-something.html - Preview

RSS Louis Gray attention

30 Dec 08

Principles for a New Media Literacy

Media are becoming democratized. Digital media tools, increasingly cheap and ubiquitous, have spawned a massive amount of creation at all levels, most notably from the ranks of the grassroots in contrast to traditional, one-to-many publications and broadcasts. The networks that made this possible have provided vast access to what people have created — potentially a global audience for anyone’s creation.

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new media literacy journalism media Center for Citizen Media attention publishing

Digital media tools, increasingly cheap and ubiquitous, have spawned a massive amount of creation at all levels, most notably from the ranks of the grassroots in contrast to traditional, one-to-many publications and broadcasts.
Media are becoming democratized. Digital media tools, increasingly cheap and ubiquitous, have spawned a massive amount of creation at all levels, most notably from the ranks of the grassroots in contrast to traditional, one-to-many publications and broadcasts. The networks that made this possible have provided vast access to what people have created — potentially a global audience for anyone’s creation.
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- In this emergent global conversation, which has created a tsunami of information, what can we trust?
- To get this right, we’ll have to re-think, or at least re-apply, some older cultural norms in distinctly modern ways.
- Trust and credibility are not new to the Digital Age.
- The new media environment is rich with potential for excellence. But it is equally open to error, honest or otherwise, and persuasion morphs into manipulation more readily than ever.
- In the traditional news world, even though we understood the prevalence of minor errors in stories, even by reputable journalists, we also understood that, by and large, the better media organizations get things pretty much right. The small mistakes undermine any notion of absolute trust, but we accept the overall value of the work.
  
  In a world with seemingly infinite sources of information, this equation is harder to solve. But we can make a start by being better informed about what we read, hear and watch.
- But most of that coverage focuses on reporting related to corporate maneuvering and profiles of stars — not bad to do but not sufficient to what the public needs.
- Apart from raw market mechanisms and the legal system’s bludgeon of libel lawsuits — both, sadly, are flawed as countermeasures to poor journalism — we have had a largely unaccountable press. New media tools are pulling down some walls and helping to create the possibility of deeper nonlegal accountability. More thorough and robust media criticism, and a conversation around it, will serve us all better.
- Media saturation requires us to become more active as consumers, in part to manage the flood of data pouring over us each day but also to make informed judgments about the significance of what we do see.
- We have come to learn that the tabloid’s front-page headline about Barack Obama’s alien love child via a Martian mate is almost certainly false, despite the fact that the publication sells millions of copies each week. We know that popularity in the traditional media world is not a proxy for quality.
- Part of our development as human beings is the creation of what we might call an internal “BS meter” — a sense of understanding when we’re seeing or hearing nonsense and when we’re hearing the truth, or something that we have reason to trust. Let’s call it, then, a “trust meter” instead of a BS meter. Either way, I imagine it ranging, say, from +30 to –30. Using that scale, a news article in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal might start out in strongly positive territory, perhaps at +26 or +27 on the trust meter. (I can think of very few journalists who start at +30 on any topic.)
  
  An anonymous comment on a random blog, by contrast, starts with negative credibility, say –26 or –27. Why on earth should we believe anything said by someone who’s unwilling to stand behind his or her own words? In most cases, the answer is that we should not. The random, anonymous commenter on a random blog should have to work hard just to achieve zero credibility, much less move into positive territory.
- Pseudonyms are becoming an online staple
  - They have always been an online staple. Always. - on 2008-12-30
  Add Sticky Note
- For all this, anonymity is essential to preserve. It protects whistleblowers and others for whom speech can be unfairly dangerous. But when people don’t stand behind their words, a reader should always wonder why and make appropriate adjustments.
- “Things I Believe” — a 10-point list of topics about which I’d come to previous conclusions. They weren’t moral or ethical in nature. Rather, they were issue-oriented, and about my job as a business and technology
  
  columnist.
  
  Every six months or so, I’d go down the list and systematically attack every proposition, looking for flaws in what I’d previously taken for granted.

29 Dec 08

Attention + Influence do not equal Authority

Buzzmachine looks at the notion of sorting Twitter posts by "authority" and finds that the traditional way of thinking about authority (as equated with big-ness) doesn't work online.

www.buzzmachine.com/...fluence-do-not-equal-authority - Preview

twitter authority BuzzMachine Jeff Jarvis influence attention

We still measure and value things online according to that scale, even though it is mostly outmoded.
The press was the filter. And the press came to believe its own PR and it conflated size with authority: We are big, therefore we have authority; our authority comes from our bigness.
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- It was my message that had authority or at least relevance, as that was the reason it was passed around. And it was the passing around that invested it with authority.
- Le Meur’s not wrong when he tries to find a way to express and calculate the idea that it’s not the author who holds authority but his or her audience.
- think there is no easy measure, but if it exists it will be found instead in relationships: seeing how an idea spreads (because it is relevant and resonates) and what role people have in that (creating the idea, finding it, spreading it, analyzing it) and what one thinks of those people (when MrTweet.net tells me that John Naughton follows someone, I’ll see more authority in that than, say, whom Robert Scoble follows - no offense, Robert - because Naughton is so highly selective).

10 Dec 08

Seth's Blog: Warning: The internet is almost full

Not a particularly new idea, but worth repeating. Seth Godin tells us that the ability of our attention to cover even a silm portion of the Web is no more. The Internet, he says, is full, or at least our attention is.

sethgodin.typepad.com/...warning-the-int.html - Preview

attention blogs Seth Godin economy of attention

Ten years ago, you had a shot of at least being aware of everything that mattered. Five years ago, you had to be really selective about what you took in, but at least it was possible to know what you didn't know. Today, it's impossible. Today, you can't even read every article on a thin slice of a thin topic.

21 Aug 08

Suddenly Snoozing Your Email Box Is The In Thing

Some people are finding that checking their e-mail is too big of a distraction throughout the workday, so they're cutting back. However, some people can't resist, which is why a few companies, including Microsoft, are working on ways to "hit the snooze bu

www.techdirt.com/...0248002041.shtml - Preview

e-mail distraction attention techdirt

01 Jul 08

John Naughton: I Google, therefore I am losing the ability to think

It's not surprising. The web, after all, was designed by a chap who was motivated to do it because he had a poor memory for some things.

www.guardian.co.uk/...googlethemedia.internet - Preview

google internet web memory search reading attention culture technology

23 Jun 08

Link by Link - Delaying News in the Era of the Internet

NBC was trying to hold back the tide by keeping Russert's death from the public eye for an hour to notify the newsman's family. News sharing technologies now make delaying the news almost impossible.

www.nytimes.com/...23link.html - Preview

news sharing dissemination essays opinion attention social_networking wikipedia

17 Jun 08

Short and Sweet: Technology Shrinks the Lecture - Chronicle.com

Professors are beginning to divide their lectures into shorter segments to hold students' attention when those lectures are posted online. These divisions have begun to migrate into the physical classroom as well.

chronicle.com/...41a00901.htm - Preview

attention web video academic learning teaching pedagogy online web2.0 youtube education media Internet