|
| Recent
Articles |
SEO
Implications For Search Personalization
A few days ago I wrote about my reservations
with personalized search. I even called it dangerous. Most people won't have
reservations, though. In fact...
The
Personalization Of SEO And Search
Personalization of Search and its implications for SEO...The personalization of
search alters search results from user to user based on the history and profile...
OPersonalized
Email In Action
Still sending out the same newsletter to every customer? Newsletters are fine,
as far as they go, but the best marketers are finding ways to deliver truly...
Online
Consumers Less Concerned About Privacy
Privacy, security and how much information consumers are willing to share with
online businesses are becoming less of an issue. Consumers are seemingly becoming
more comfortable with information they provide to...
Maintain
Customer Attention Span
With customer attention span becoming shorter and shorter, e-commerce businesses
and small online entrepreneurs alike are looking for creative and...
Google
Custom Search: My Search, My Results
Wouldn't it be great to use a search engine that shows results tailored to what
you want and what youneed? Something customizable to fit your site but still...
Personalization
In Email Marketing
Marketing by email has grown into a science! No longer can we just throw a hastily
written email to our prospects and expect results. In the ever growing sea of
spam, our email really must stand out if it is to be seen and...
|
|
03.15.07
Analyzing
Attention
 By
Ross Mayfield
Read/Write Web had a good overview
the attention economy the other week,written by Alex Iskold and edited by
Richard MacManus. They suggest information overload will be solved through
personalization and explain the trust issues of information metadata. Unfortunately,
the analysis is flawed on both the cause and scope of the solution.
Pointing to the meteoric rise of weblogs as measured by Technorati, they argue
the more information there is, the more difficult it is to manage attention.
Attention economy is a relatively underdeveloped theory, and Wikipedia
page for that matter -- from which they ground this assumption:
Herbert
Simon was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention
economics when he wrote:
"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth
of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What
information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.
Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate
that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that
might consume it" ( Simon
1971, p. 40-41).
However, merely having more information available in the world does not mean there
is a dearth of attention. This supply/demand view is the economics of scarcity.
This this is information we are talking about, which is driven by the economics
of abundance. Turn the equation around from consuming information to giving
attention. Then we can proceed.
Just because there is more information doesn't mean you have to consume more.
Ignoring is not ignorance. Further, the medium in which individuals gained
the means to publish is the same one that provides the means to manage attention.
This isn't broadcasting, where Sarnoff's Law says the value of the network is
the number of nodes that consume. It is a network. Where Metcalfe's
Law measures value by N squared and Reed's Law of Group Forming holds we have
an exponential potential through communities to process information.
After Simon, with the rise of the web people thought it would be crushed by the
Babel problem -- if everyone can be heard, how do we choose who to listen to amongst
the cacophony? Yochai
Benkler addressed this in the Wealth of Networks. He pointed out flaws
in the theory that money would be the only driver for a solution, given the abundant
means to produce filters through commons-based peer production. And how
within hypertext, when producers are filters, using the blogosphere as an example,
we can scale without being overwhelmed. The social network is the filter.
This is, in part, because of transparency. Oddly enough, transparency begets
memory. We don't have to consume and process every bit of information that crosses
our desk, but can fall back upon search and social discover.
Benkler, however, underpinned his analysis by submitting that the one scarcity
is time and attention of users. Classical training makes this an obvious
insight, perhaps too obvious. As users, and anthropological observers,
it is hard to see how the overload could be anything else. But I think networks
are still optimized for the days of Sarnoff and encroaching upon Metcalfe.
Media is increasingly networked, but the role of groups in filtering is undervalued
by your average user.
Read the rest of the article.
About
the Author:
Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.
|
|
