This whole recent burst of discussion about how we’re all in an attention economy is very interesting, but actually nothing all that new.

Although this was the hot topic at the recent O’’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in San Diego, the fact is, Thomas H. Davenport and John Beck co-authored an excellent book, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, (Harvard Business Press) way back in 2001. In that book, the authors discuss how our scattered and diffused attention has become the scarce resource that marketers must learn how to capture. And the peer-reviewed digital scholarly journal First Monday wrote about it in 1997.

Today, this meme is getting new a new life in Web 2.0 several different ways:

* As part of the reputation management discipline. Reputation and where attention is being “spent” are closely related.

* By the use of the phrase “continuous partial attention”” to describe the multitasking method of Net users, particularly younger ones, to pay primary attention to one element in view, while monitoring everything else in the periphery

* By the claim by some that speakers, professors, and others do not automatically deserve an audience’s undivided attention, but must earn it by being compelling and more interesting than whatever those in the audience can locate virtually (eg emails, IMs, Web browsing, flick photos, etc.). In this philosophy, physical presence has no greater claim on one’’s attention then a virtual presence

* A movement by some to “take back” one’’s measurements of attention, measured primarily by clickstreams and Web pages browsed, as a valuable commodity whose ownership should not just be made freely available to marketers and search engines for sale to the highest bidding, but to the individual. Services like Root Vaults and AttentionTrust are making the ability to reclaim that “attention data” possible for Web users.

On this topic, I recommend reading Steve Rubel’s very interesting post on how organization can track where a designated group’s attention is being “spent” via using some digital tools like FeedBlendr and FeedBurner

Technorati Tag: Attention Economy