Your audience is gone what you are left with are participants.

If there is just one thing I could tell advertisers this year about their role in Web 2.0 it would sound something like this ” Content creators need to understand and respect and value the role of aggregators to help them find an audience. Further, they need to understand how Personalized Aggregation (based on Attention) changes the publisher/audience dynamic.”

As you may have experienced sitting in on a focus group discussion, participants have opinions and different tastes. One participant may have completely different expectations from a product than the other. On the web consumers want highly personalized experiences but on the other hand this experience needs to be delivered in a format which makes sense to them. Currently we are presented with an overload of information and ways to find it. A massive misunderstanding of Web 2.0 is that you get to clutter my life with a million brightly coloured chiklets.

“When faced with information overload we will need to understand how to grab the consumer attention. By measuring one’s Attention you can learn what they are interested in. By learning what they are interested in you can learn what content they want to see more of. From there, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to connecting content creators with participants”….or advertising to consumers.

Search engines document and archive the web then role it out in any old format i.e. PDF, html, word, flash and that is fine but the preferred delivery formats will change in the wake of RSS. Understanding the new attention economy means being able to reformat delivery in a way which is de cluttered, intuitive and is tuned into your tribal space and even that of your nana’s bridge club participants.

I scan through at least 500 articles and blog posts a week to pick out a few which grab my attention which I then review and perhaps reformat in a way I believe will catch your interest . However how do I know you are actually going to take the time to read these posts ? With the amount of information pushed out in front of you on a daily basis I will have to forgive your attention deficit for missing out on these few posts I made on my blog this week.

“Attention Deficit is a phenomenon that occurs at watershed moments in publishing. It occurred when TV went from 3 to 300 channels. It occurred when the internet reduced the cost of publishing and it is occurring again as social/time-shifted media takes root in the main stream.”

So if you did happen to read this post you will now be on the cutting edge of the web, at the threshold of the launch of something rather big namely the ‘attention management engine’. Its like VCR was for TV, Search Engines were to the Internet. The attention management engine works out the personal relevancy and degree of importance of an item of information or content and then feeds it to you in a way which will grab your attention be it as a Desktop alert, news ticker, screen popover/up, SMS, mobile alert: YOU decide.

Touchstone is an Australian company currently running a beta test of one of very few applications using the virtues of RSS (XML) and formats information in a way even your grandmother could understand. To do this they use a protocol called APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language ) this is an XML file that contains an outline of ‘Implicit and Explicit interests and Sources Rankings by Device and Profile’. Fred Wilson and I share our view on RSS.

“To hit the mainstream] RSS has to become brain dead simple to use”. - Fred Wilson - Touchstone

However it seems this could be taken a step further and a combination of something called Liquid Lists (see video demo below) using Touchstone’s Attention Management Engine could completely redefine the way you are using the internet today. It could in fact integrate with what some analysts are calling your ‘lifestream’ which is basically the footprints you leave on the web or for that matter any digital platform which is able to record or track your presence.

Sam Sethi is the founder of the start up Liquid Lists. Sam has already started work on another start-up called Liquid Lists which focuses on helping people discover information based on their “attention” and that of people in their trusted social network. Liquid Lists is an example of the next generation of semantic “real-time” web applications. He believes that people will want to be able to share their ‘lifestream’ data with others.

“Of course you aren’t going to want to share with just anybody. Now by combining multiple ‘lifestreams’ you will be able to discover what’s hot or not (places to go, music to hear, video to watch) a bit like a personal recommendation based on the behaviour of you friends attention.”

Obviously you aren’t going to want to share this personal data with just anybody save perhaps your family members and close friends. However in light of the trend ‘connecting lifestyle’s the information you leave with your digital footprint could even be used to define who wants to go out with you. This is what social networking 2.0 is all about, who you connect to and who wants to connect to you.

Check back tomorrow when I tell you what I think this means for advertisers.

Further reading on this subject: Web 2.0 applied in an Enterprise – a huge business opportunity Peter Reiser

Jeremy Keith’s blog: http://adactio.com/journal/1202/

For a visual representation of these trends see the follwoing links (I shall be adding more in due course):

- http://dandelife.com/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 12:11 am and is filed under Anything else, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.