While thinking more about my experience with the Windows Live Mail survey I participated in I came upon an interesting article about the Attention Economy. In the article Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect and main strategist for Windows Live, explains how the Live services vision of web services will be financed through advertisements, subscriptions and transactions. This triangle of business models is the future for Microsoft’s software and fledgling hardware empire.
Hosting this article is the Attention Trust, a not-for-profit organisation whose principle is:
“When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created. This “attention data” is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values, and it serves as a proxy for your attention.”
Attention has value. Amazon, eBay, Apple, MySpace, Google and now Microsoft know this. Each are employing techniques based on social networking, trust, what people are looking for (and equally what they ignore) and are using it to cream money off for themselves. Breaking down traditional “As seen on TV” trust models about products and brands. Afterall, who do you trust more than your mates?
Let the people have the power, let them enjoy their position of power, reward them for their attention, provide the channel for them to ‘communicate’ their attention and fill this communication channel with adverts, micropayments to ‘pimp’ their channel and then cream off a small amount of the transaction cost if anyone buys anything as a result of the channel. License to print money 