Its all About Attention

Esther Dyson discussed on OpenBusiness a while ago “The Value of Attention”. Now the Wall Street Journal had an exchange between Vint Cerf and her. Its interesting to note, that she has extended her observations to point out that we will see:

“a fundamental shift in the balance of power towards individuals. Individuals will declare what kinds of vendors they want sponsoring their content, and then those vendors will have the privilege of appearing, discreetly, around the user’s content. There will be much less “advertising” and much more communication to interested customers. Advertisers will have to learn to listen, not just to track and segment customers.”

This is the elephant in the room and the questions the likes of Murdoch now need to engage with. How to produce interesting advertisment methodologies for something like MySpace.com which do not scare the community away. Tricky is here how we conceptualize “attention”. Google has widened the concept to make use of the aggregated power of small, individual websites, but other go even further.

On Roughtype
Mr Goldhaber is quoted as expanding the concept even further:

- it is about the “notion of users getting paid for their attention, whether in the form of surfing behavior or a willingness to read email” (good mail).
- attention is a two way concept. It is not just about how much attention people are willing to give, but also about how much they want to receive.
He says “People judge their own worth by their number of friends (Friendster) or fans (MySpace) or business contacts (LinkedIn)”.
I would say there is space for some very interesting business models.