Seth posted it a while ago, and I finally have read it. It’s worth your time. From it:
Our actions, expressed as Attention, establish networks that connect us, our family, our friends, our colleagues and our affinities.
The net currently has a schizophrenic but unique way of remembering bits and pieces of these attention streams: Not all data is captured; the consumer has no central attention management tool; and most companies don’t want you moving your history between their networks anyway.
Despite these points of friction, more and more applications are being built upon our attention streams.
Innovations in internet media are like handfuls of white flour dropped over the invisible outlines of consumer intention. At times, user behavior drives media construction directly, but at other times the original user behavior evolves beyond the ability of the media to engage it. These hollow shells of former behavior are being swept up constantly by domain, banner, click-thru and lead brokers who recycle the detritus into more usable (aka monetizable) impressions.
And that’s before he gets into the role of worms, real worms, in understanding new media and search, and then turns one of my favorite stories, The Phantom Tollbooth, into a lesson:
This weekend maybe I will sit down with [my son] outside, on the grass, dig into the soil with my hand and pick up a worm.“Do you remember that scene from Phantom Tollbooth, where they are selling words? Well, when the words go stale and nobody wants them, do you know what happens to them?” I am not sure how he will respond. But I will take the worm, put it in his hand, and say “The worms eat the words.” And he will probably look at me like I am joking and being the smartie that he is, will ask “And what do the worms do with them?” And I’ll tell him frankly “Why, the worms feed the words to Google.” And he will laugh, and I will laugh.
But I wont be kidding.