We have written extensively at Read/WriteWeb about Attention and the Attention Economy.
As a concept attention makes sense to anyone who is online today. We know when we are paying attention and we know what we are paying attention to.
The problem is that the information about our attention is not readily available to us afterwards. The premise of the Attention Economy
is that people are in control of their attention information. This control lets them use the information to receive
utility and services.
The reality is that our attention information is scattered all over the web, bits of it lying in different silos. Anytime we buy books, rent movies, click on pictures or listen to music the information is recorded and stored. Each vendor makes an specific effort to capture what we liked, but most do not make much effort to help us get this information out of their system. And why should they? After all, that consumer information is a competitive advantage for each business. Breaking existing attention silos and creating a real attention economy appears to be a complex, if not impossible task. In this post we will take at broad look at the problem in attempt to figure out what can be done.
Following the success of Facebook Week, every week on Read/WriteWeb we are going to focus on a particular Web Technology topic and investigate it. We'll write 4-5 feature posts on each topic, run a poll, and also revisit past R/WW posts on the subject. We're calling this new feature the Read/WriteWeb Files.
This week we've opened up a file on a recent statement from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. It was during Yang's debut earnings conference call on Tuesday 17 July, in which he said that "the next 100 days or so" will be spent mapping out Yahoo’s strategic plan. Here is Yang's full '100 days' statement:
Lending Club is an online lending community where people can borrow and lend money, bypass the banks, and supposedly get better rates. What's really interesting about this is that Lending Club operates entirely via Facebook. It is a Facebook community and does not operate as a standalone website (although they have plans to). Read/WriteWeb listed Lending Club as one of our Top 10 Facebook Apps: Work, noting that it's a peer lending application that lets users take out loans funded by other users. Lending club opened on Facebook on May 24th, as a featured app in the F8 Facebook event.
On Thursday July 26, Lending Club passed the mark of half a million dollars lent and borrowed among its members, just a month after it passed $100k. This milestone was passed 7 weeks after they announced the first loan on June 6, which the company says "is certainly faster than we anticipated." The company says that to date, there have not been any default or late payments. The close ratio on the site is at 84%, meaning that more than 4 out of every 5 loans get funded - and a borrower always has the ability to relist a loan if it didn’t get funded the first time.
Alex Iskold wrote a great post on his company's blog, outlining conference tips for startups. It is written from a vendor or sponsor's point of view and makes for interesting reading. Alex definitely recommends ETech, SXSW. He gives a firm "maybe" to TechCrunch Party, Web 2.0 Expo, Web 2.0 Summit, Defrag, Blog World, AJAXWorld. His comments about what startups should do at conferences are helpful. For example he says of the recent TechCrunch party:
A new Forrester report states that Instant Messenging (IM) is by far the most valuable 'web 2.0' tool for enterprises:
"Web 2.0 tools and technologies are the latest in a long line of technologies that have taken root with consumers who then smuggle them into the business world. IM is one notable example. To this point, the Web 2.0 tools that we inquired about fall well short of the value that businesspeople associate with IM. Thirty-seven percent of respondents reported substantial business value from IM, compared with an average of just 16% for the other Web 2.0 tools."
The report was compiled based on feedback from 275 IT decision-makers. Other than IM, the report found that RSS and podcasting showed "the highest average business value", while social networking and blogging showed the lowest. RSS is mostly being used in enterprises for corporate communications or content aggregation, while only one in three Forrester respondents uses RSS for external marketing purposes.
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Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
It was a relatively quiet week in terms of Web technology news. Perhaps the most exciting thing to happen was an 'old media' organization using online video in a televised political debate - i.e. the CNN-YouTube Debates. Eight Democratic presidential hopefuls took the stage in South Carolina -- a crucial early primary state -- for a debate sponsored by CNN and YouTube, in which all of the questions were submitted by users of YouTube. It was mocked rather nicely on The Daily Show later that day (the hip-hop home dancing takeoff especially!), but still the CNN-YouTube Debates was a great example of how the Internet can be used in politics and mainstream media.
As part of their ongoing quest to create an open, people-powered search platform, Wikia has acquired Grub, a ditributed web crawling technology, from Looksmart, Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced this morning during his keynote address at the at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. The technology will be added to their Search Wikia Labs project in an effort to create an "open and transparent" search engine that combines a "distributed user-contributed processing network, with the power of a wiki to form social consensus," according to a press release
Grub, which works something like the SETI@Home project by using spare processor cycles donated by users to crawl the web, will become an open source technology located at Grub.org. The source code will be released "as soon as possible." Emre Sokullu wrote about building an open source distributed Google clone back in May, and envisioned a project that seems similar to Wales' goal.
iRovr is a social network built specifically for the iPhone. As near as I can tell, it launched to the public about 10 days ago and has just over 400 users. iRovr is not the first iPhone specific social networking site (iPHONEcolony, which is mostly a blogging application, predates it), but I think it probably the most complete and perhaps the slickest in terms of design.
iRovr is about blogging, sharing photos, videos, and bookmarks, and making friends. Nearly everything you do on iRovr is done by email. When you sign up at the site with your primary iPhone email account, iRovr sends you a list of account specific email addresses to add to you address book. Writing to one enters a blog post, sending pictures to another posts photos, etc.
Today
hakia added a hakia highlighter to their “meaning-based” search engine, producing a highlighted sentence
inside a search result. The bigger announcement is tomorrow, when hakia will launch a scoop button - a browser plug-in that not only highlights text, but when you click on a result page it scrolls automatically to the highlighted passage, enables you to save data to your computer, and more customization features that we'll discuss below.
Both of these new tools allow for faster more relevant result selection and additional utility for users.
Today MySpace announced a partnership with the Producer's Guild of America to hold a contest this fall, "The Storyteller Challenge," that will allow web content producers to compete for a possible development deal with Fox (and $25,000). I've been reading coverage of this all day, and I think Variety probably nailed it: This is an attempt by Fox to salvage their new summer reality show "On The Lot," which has so far had lackluster performance. (For the record, the reason I stopped watching "On The Lot" was that I found it hard to take Antoine Fuqua, the director of the box office abomination "King Arthur," seriously as an expert).
Users will be able to submit 5-7 minute pilots for television shows starting on September 4, 2007. The winners will be selected in January by a combination of user votes, and an "expert panel" consisting of Fox executives, film school faculty, and Producers Guild members.
