Friday, October 12, 2007

Social Graph & Attention Economy

It's all the rage now to look at the bigger picture of social media and how all of these 'tiny' pieces fit together to inform a semantic web of human relationships. The concept seems to have gained ground in the past month, suddenly I'm seeing it in a lot of blogging on web 2.0 and hearing colleagues (a la Julz) talk about it's connection to education.

Take a start by reading this article from Read/Write web...
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_graph_concepts_and_issues.php

Of course what really cracked my thinking open was this reference to the Attention Economy -
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/attention_economy_overview.php

I think it's definitely related to the 'Fakebook' phenomenon...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06mathias.html?ex=1349409600&en=2da1c3f706197a55&ei=5124&partner=delicious&exprod=delicious

We want people to see our profiles...but we find it disconcerting to think that anyone knows which profiles we're actually looking at...Our attention, where we spend our time, what we read, what we look at...it's valuable marketing information and the basis of an economic force.

Another cool stream I got from this article is my newest fave feed...
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

Wow...now go play and check out these sites, they will really get you thinking!