Attention the Prom Queen

by Joshua Porter | 5 Comments

So Dave Winer finally linked to Steve Gillmor. That’s how big this attention thing is getting. Dave, whom I don’t know personally but from reading him for two years I can tell he is as deliberate as they come, silently admitted in linking to Steve that attention is becoming a coin of the realm. Of course, the link came when attention and Dave’s OPML finally hit head on. Nick Bradbury is having great, open conversations about it, too. Do you know what the attention equation is?

Seth Goldstein, a cofounder (along with Gillmor) of AttentionTrust, writes today that his /ROOT Markets is the solution to the inefficient attention markets, and how the securitization of Internet leads will open up the Attention market for consumers. He also says that with pay-per-click, the risk of online advertising shifts from the publisher to the advertiser, where it belongs. Now, he says, we just need to care.

Then there’s Alex Barnett, who in his open letter to Chris Law and Paul Martino, shows concern for their attention aggregator: WSFinder. WSFinder is a recommendations web service that enables a website to easily implement a “People who liked this (song, book, group) also liked the following…” function. Paul responds with good news.

Not so long ago attention became my prom queen, when I realized that it is the finite resource that I have to give to a market of ever-increasing information. In order to make attention more efficient, I need better answers in the form of helpful systems, like recommendation systems, and I need them yesterday.

Now everybody wants in. The Wall Street Journal reports that advertising on sites like MSN, AOL, and Yahoo are getting to the level of Super Bowl television ads. That’s how much one day’s attention is worth on these sites. And it’s every day of the year, on multiple networks, not just the one silly enough to bone up billions for one game. (via Paul Kedrosky)

Apparently, TV isn’t where the action is anymore. Sure, you could let ABC define how you live your life and watch Lost at 9pm on Wednesdays, or you could cuddle up on the iTunes couch and watch it when you want.

Let’s not forget Skype getting bought out by eBay, or MySpace, Murdoch. Flickr, Yahoo. Bloglines, Ask Jeeves. They got their return on attention in a big way.

They’re wearing really nice dresses to the prom. You got a date yet?