As Dave Sifry of Technorati puts it, attention is fundamentally about time. Attention is time directed to a purpose by people. So, like time, attention is a scarce resource and a great democratizer. At the same time, attention is currency:
Seth Goldstein from Root Markets provided a reasonable starting point for articulating the value of attention. If attention is where you go, what you listen to, what you read, what you avoid, who you talk to, what you buy, how long you spend doing it, then you can create a history and reputation of attention.
Root Markets offers the concept of reputation management, and PPAs (promises to pay attention). Root plans to securitize these, and Goldstein compares attention bonds to mortgages, which are both promises with value. An impression is worth a penny, a click is worth 75 cents, an email is worth a dollar, an army app is worth $1,000. What is your attention worth? Do you want to give its value away? Industry organizations like AttentionTrust are focused on attention property, mobility, economy, and transparency, and on getting ownership back in the hands of the individual.
The Root Vault is a place where users can store their attention data. You can see, beyond just a list, exactly what you pay attention to. This level of granularity provides an unprecedented ability to navel-gaze. (And don't get me wrong, I'm a navel-gazer; I eagerly checked my Feedburner account after its first day and thrilled to the sight of 9 intrepid subscribers.) You can also compare shared interests with other people, based on the attention data that they have stored and shared in their own Root Vault.
Goldstein's objective is to manage millions of these attention databases, with millions of different schema. These histories of attention enable experiences designed for the individual. This means spending attention on the things that you want (people that you trust, relevant information, and needed advice), and not blowing it on things you don't want or need (advertisers, strangers, spammers, data brokers, unsolicited calls, inappropriate information.)
As Sifry notes, time can't be hoarded; you must use it or lose it. It's an instantly perishable resource. There's only 24 hours in each day
(including some amount of sleep), and life spans aren't expanding much.
So that time needs to be used well. (Sifry actually said "efficiently", but I
don't think that I agree that time needs to or should be used
efficiently overall. Hover when you find a savory moment, I say.)
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys technology etech o'reilly attention technorati root markets attentiontrust
