Your Attention Please

I met up with Fergus Burns from Nooked at Internet World yesterday and we got to talking about the status of Web 2.0 in the UK.  While it's well behind the US the background noise is rising and it's possible to see the big themes emerging from the mega-quag of content being shared, packaged and despatched into the user generated world.  One such theme is the idea of The Attention Economy which starts with the not unreasonable premis that (loosely) there used to be more people than commercial content but now that situation has reversed.  Which results in a sparsity of - you guessed it - people's attention.  So in a world where information and content is almost free to distribute and growing like a pandemic, the only shortage is our ability to process the darn stuff.  Or in other words information overload - a sensation I think we can...

...all agree is a very real and everday matter.  However, the TAE idea itself has spawned a ton of ideas to try and answer the problem with additional refinements being thrown in in all the time.  Now right now, the idea of Attention is mainly for the alpha geeks as most UK marketeers are more focused on getting their heads around the world of blogs and user generated media.  But as the Web 2.0 steamer gradually makes its way across the pond, it's good to keep an eye on what the tech-jocks are playing around with.

Comments

[Colin Donald]

Hi James,

Futurescape has launched a wiki to list new British digital media projects, including 2.0 stuff, at www.jigsawuk.org - if you know of anything that should be included, please do come over and add it.

Regards,

Colin