The prevalent buzz here at ETech this year focuses on attention, attention economics, partial continuous attention streams and many other attention buzzwords. But what does it all mean? For the first half of today I walked around with the general impression that this whole attention concept is mostly hype and doesn't really have much real world applicability yet. Even after hearing three seperate talks on the same topic it was still unclear.
Then I had the chance to talk with Seth Goldstein, the CEO of Root Markets to ask him a few pointed questions that set me onto the right track. Seth pointed out to me that our everyday actions on the net actually make us producers of information. For instance, the listing of sites I visit in a day (my browser history, essentially) is information and this information could potentially be useful to other people and companies. My Amazon purchase history is another great example of information that I produce as a by product of going about life. By making a purchase, I generate one more piece of information. We constantly generate these piece of data: Each phone call we make, each tank of gas we buy and each web site we visit presents another piece of data in an ever growing stream of attention data.
Framing humans as generators of attention data, almost like incidental bloggers, starts bringing the attention concepts into focus for me. Now that we've established that humans generate data, we can start to explore how to take this raw data and turn it into useful information. By becoming aware of our own attention data, we start to use it to fine tune where we spend our attention and improve what we do with our time overall.
For instance, if Cory Doctorow, the main prolific blogger behind BoingBoing were to send his click stream (a list of web sites he reads) to a Root Vault with Root Markets, I could follow his trail and tune which sites I read in a day. I'm certain I would discover an array of new sites and resources that I didn't know existed and and broaden my horizons. I could dump my less useful sites and view the world more through the eyes of a hyperproductive person. (I see this as a live version of the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People book)
There are tons of obvious privacy issues associated with attention data. For instance, if I were surfing the net and researching a blog posting materializing in my head, I might want to choose to share my click stream with others -- others might find value in following my research and seeing how I came about my blog post. But then if after my blog post I decide to surf the net for porn, I would probably not be interested in sharing that information with the world. But what if I forget to turn my click stream off? That could be embarrasing quickly. The same applies for spammers/phishers getting a hold of my surfing click stream. If your attention data ends up in the wrong hands you can quickly become a victim.
One core idea behind attention is that time is a scarce resource. No matter what you do, you can never have more than 24 hours in a day. And you spend nearly a third of that time sleeping, which leaves precious few hours in the day, thus where you focus your attention in these few hours becomes a greater issue. With so many distractions in a day (phones, email, IM, social networks, etc.) many people are getting overloaded with information and may not spend their attention wisely.
The three presentations today all mentioned time as a scarce resource and that properly using your attention assets would allow you to make better use of your time. When I consider this concept, I start thinking about how neat it would be to follow other people's attention streams and see the world more like them. But in the end, this doesn't sound like it's going to focus my attention more. It sounds like it could diffuse my attention and simply become one more stream of information that demands my attention, which is exactly the opposite of what advocates are telling us.
As you can see, I am still working my way though the concept. I haven't had a chance yet to play with Root Markets yet, since it does appear to take some time to bootstrap your information into the system. Maybe playing with a concrete application will solidify these concepts further for me. Or maybe I should listen to a few more attention talks now that I've grokked the very basic concepts. In either case, I'll try and revisit this topic when I wrap up my coverage of ETech.
Do you think I'm on the right track? Tell me what you think!
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