The two-way attention economy?

John Hagel parses Dyson's interpretation of Goldhaber's attention economy. The upshot: people want other people to pay attention to them. I suspect we will see some people engage in a Darwinian struggle for attention online. This analysis is probably too narrow. The motivations for why people blog will change. Their motivations will be as varied as the real world.

My personal arc (over 5 years of blogging) is as follows:
1) reluctantly started blogging.
2) found I enjoyed it.
3) was ranked for a bit of time in the top 100 blogs. This was nice. It was also nice to have a high Google rank. That partly faded because a) I didn't care about it and b) the level of competition rose quickly.
4) found something more useful. An open online identity (my name is on the blog) yielded work, contacts, and recognition that anonymity doesn't provide. That benefit doesn't require a high ranking to accomplish.
5) found that the blog is as much for me as anyone else.
6) enjoy the response that other people have to my thinking. As long as there a few fellow travelers out there with me, that is reason enough to write.

Comments

[zenpundit]

You're a " must read" for me John. You are always looking at the big picture and the interconnections at the same time and that's rare.

[interstar]

I'd say you're doing about right.

The Attention Economy is basically one aspect of what I'd call netocracy : an economy of links or connections where links are considered a kind of wealth in their own right.

However links, unlike dollars, come in various types, strengths and qualities.

Sometimes a few good quality attentional links are more valuable than a lot of weak or poor quality links. If your online identity provides the kind of links that bring valuable work offers and useful information or discussion, then you're better off with them than trying to appeal to a broader, less committed mass-audience.

As "being famous" is a fairly zero-sum game (after all Goldhaber chooses attention precisely because it *is* scarce) most people will play the netocracy game by trying to strategically position themselves as well as they can, with a few highish quality or very strong links that are particularly appropriate to their skills and temperament.

In fact, one of the things we can see at the moment is that in an age of "reality" TV shows and minor celebrities, "being famous" ie. well known by large but low-value audience, is both easier than ever and ever more meaningless. The real beneficiaries of this long tail of minor celebrity nobodies are the main-stream media who are increasingly *aggregating* them.

The heart of netocratic theory is to distinguish two economic activities :

* "exploitation" which means trying to monetize your links (eg. by selling advertising, or selling access to your friends or selling some valuable information you got via one of your links for money,

and

* "imploitation" which essentially means investing link-capital to make more link-capital eg. publishing good, valuable, information for free in order to win more high quality attention (more regular discerning readers); or conversely, polling a group of quality readers in order to get more quality information.

Of the two, imploitation is likely to be increasingly important.

[John Robb]

Thanks Zen, you are too.

[Josh Koenig]

I've always liked the David Weinberger formulation: "Everyone is faimous for fifteen people."

In the end, the power-scale type of a-list blog celebrity is fleeting and not really all that important in the long run. An individual/site can serve as an inflection point and really be crucial, but multimedia is going to increasingly take this role (larger potential audiences/more persuasive medium) and the long-haul value of blogging is ultimately elsewhere: creating a rich network of loose ties, engaging in productive discourse, and helping good/interesting things emerge from this enhanced plaform of social capital.

[phil jones]

"Everyone will be famous for fifteen people"

Momus : http://www.imomus.com/index499.html