Attention

Herbert Simon, who Wikipedia tells me was one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century, once said:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

Simon, H. A. (1971), "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, ISBN 0-8018-1135-X., p. 40-41.

That seems to be an incredibly insightful statement considering the overwhelming amount of information that we are bombarded with today. 500+ TV channels, email, IM, text messaging, ubiquitous broadband connections, ubiquitous advertising... It's no wonder that Attention Deficit Disorder is on the rise.

I love being connected. I love learning random things here and there. I'm sure many of you reader(s) will agree. But, by being connected we are creating a profile of what captures our Attention.

Marketers, obviously, understand the concept of Attention very well. They would like to understand what has the attention of their target markets and how they can somehow get a piece of that attention. When you are connected, particularly in this new Web 2.0 social networking world, who is watching when you blog, or microblog, or IM, or purchase, or click? And how does your past activity affect what you are presented with in the future?

By choosing to participate in Web 2.0 services, you are, to some degree, agreeing to allow your web footprint to be tracked. Is Attention tracking a bad thing? How does a consumer win in an environment where their Attention is being tracked? How can a consumer manipulate their Attention information to their own benefit?

Tag Cloud

Yesterday, I described how tags act as metadata in an image search. Metadata tags can be (and increasing are) associated with any object or concept on the web.

Consider the web site del.icio.us. Due to its name, when I first surfed to del.icio.us, I was concerned that I might encounter images and an endless array of popups which I wouldn't want young children to see. Be honest! When you see that there is a web site called "del.icio.us", what do you think of? Food? Yeah, right! Maybe if someone is wearing the food!

Actually, del.icio.us is a wonderful site where you can store a collection of your favorite links with any choice of associated tags. del.icio.us then tracks all the users that save the same link and all of the tags that are associated with that link. A link's associated tags may be visualized using a "tag cloud". A tag that is used by a large number of users is represented by a larger font.

When you post a new favorite link in del.icio.us, they actually suggest tags to use for that link (if the link has been posted before). This technique helps to build some sense of congruence amongst the users of the community. With del.icio.us, web searches can be made based on how other users have tagged their favorite sites.

This all leads to today's haiku...

lust, gluttony, greed,
sloth, wrath, envy, pride - deadly
sins or great tag cloud?

Tags

How do you search a database of images? One solution would be to associate metadata with the image. Metadata is data(2) about data(1). In this case, data(1) would be a particular image, while data(2) might take the form of text based descriptive tags. For example, the following image may have the tags "ireland", "ocean", "landscape", "green", "photo", etc. associated with it.



Now when someone enters text "ireland" into an image search engine this image should come up as one of the results. Unfortunately, the search engine is only as good as the tags associated with the image. If the searcher entered "moher" into the engine, the image would not make the list even though it is a picture of the Cliffs of Moher.

Who tags all these images? Well... we, the users, tag the images.

My description of image searching is particularly simplified. I have no idea if this is how the photo site Flickr works. But it might...

Please note that I am not paid to promote Flickr. If you would like to change that, please contact my business department.