Ken Auletta writes about Walt Mossberg in the New Yorker:
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Directory of Attention
This week’s WSJ column (subscription only, I’m afraid) is about attention:
If you feel the Internet has both blessed you with an abundance of information and cursed you by drowning you in it, I have one word which might help make sense of it all: attention. (And, if you give me enough of your attention, I promise to give you a tip about how to cope.)
It’s beginning to dawn on people who ponder these kinds of things that it’s attention, not information, which lies at the heart of the new online world. In a world full of information, the scarcest commodities are your eyeballs and ears.
Here are some links to find out more. Suggestions very welcome, as ever.
Attention, according to The Attention Trust, is the substance of focus. It registers your interests by indicating choice for certain things and choice against other things. Any time you pay attention to something (and any time you ignore something), data is created. That data has value, but only if it’s gathered, measured, and analyzed.
A definition of Attention Data from Chris Saad. And I like this one from, again, The Attention Trust:
When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created. This “attention data” is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values, and it serves as a proxy for your attention.
Wikipedia’s entry on the Attention Economy, and The Attention Economy: An Overview from the excellent Read/Write Web, are also well-worth a read (as well as the comments.) A look at Google’s role in all this from Sam Sethi, who asks: Is Google building the Attention Economy?
I quoted liberally from Anne Zelenka, who is writing a book on this kind of thing. Check out her blog here, and a great piece she wrote on where attention fits into the whole Web 2.0 thing.
Stuff to play with:
- Particls, formerly Touchstone, which is a ticker that tries to understand you or tick you off. (My description, not theirs.)
- I didn’t have a chance to write about Attensa for Outlook, but it’s trying to do something a bit similar.
- Or the AttentionMap, which “helps you keep track of your attention on a daily basis.”
See also my Directory of Lifestreams
Helping the World, Ripple by Ripple
God, I love simple ideas. This is great one (tip of hat to Lifehack) because it’s already working. By doing your search through Melbourne-based ripple, and looking at an ad, you direct the cents your eyeballs earn to charity. A few hours after launch the difference is already being felt:
In our first 48 hours we received enough visitors to provide:
* 2 people with access to clean water and sanitation FOR LIFE! and;
* Seven years of education to 2 children in East Timor; and
* Maintain more than $334,800 in micro-finance loans for a day. That’s around 800 loans to allow people in the Phillipines and elsewhere to start their own business; and
* Set up 15 market gardens in Cambodia to provide nutritious food to a village
I’ve done a more extensive write-up at tenminut.es.
The Distraction of Phones
Why are we so intrigued by our phones, but not our computers?
I now realise why we buy new cellphones. If we didn’t, there would be nothing to do during those times we find ourselves without external distractions, such as taking public transport, sitting in cafes waiting for friends to turn up (or even, if they have, but turn out to be less interesting than we remember), or during any social function which might involve actually communicating with someone we don’t know (or even ones we do).
That’s when we explore features on our phone. We’re quite happy to spend hours, days, years even exploring every nook and cranny of our gadget to see what it can do. It’s not that we’re particularly interested in it, or what features it might have, but when compared to something as hard as actually interacting with other people, reading the dense and portentous content of newspapers, or even lifting one’s neck to look out of the bus window, we’d rather adopt the more ergonomically satisfying posture of head down, cradling a pleasing form factor and delving into sub-menus with the vague idea of changing a ring-tone, or wallpaper, or something. Anything but actually cope with anything external.
That’s why phone manufacturers add features, and that’s why they bring out new phones all the time. So my question is this: Why, when we’re at our computer, do we not have that same inquisitiveness? Why do all my friends know every single little feature on their cellphone but have no idea what features like “print to PDF” are? And, perhaps more pertinently, why are they so incurious about their computers that the prefer to pick up the phone, or Skype, or cross heavily mined international borders by foot to bug me with problems that could be solved with one, possibly two, mouseclicks?
That Sucking Sound? Your Credit Card Data
Good piece by my WSJ colleage Joe Pereira on the TJX debacle, the biggest known theft of credit-card numbers. It all came down to lax Wi-Fi security on the part of the retail chain’s stores. A good read:
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