Monday, September 25, 2006

Social Networks and Attention

I was at dinner with Howard Rheingold organised at the very last moment by Ian Forrester. It was a very good evening thoroughly enjoyed. But this post isn't about the actual dinner but a comment made by one of the attendees.

Discussion had turned to "The Daily Show" and "Colbert Report." Then the comment was made "I watch 'The Daily Show' but not the 'Colbert Report' as I am sure with my social network that if there is something really funny on the 'Colbert Report', I will find out about it" or words to that effect.

The comment shows an interesting trend in managing attention. People are using their social networks to expand the amount of attention they have. By relying on different parts of your social network to pay attention for interesting items effectively expands the amount of attention a user has.

What is the impact of this? I'm not sure as I haven't had the chance to fully think the implications through. Top of the head is that it will complicate the monetisation of attention. It also indicates that making very general social networks profitable will not be easy. The better route is adding social networking features around a series of more focused websites. Shades of the old Geocites and AngelFire?

The other side of the coin is that this is an interesting adaptation by an individual to managing information overload.

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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Where have I been?

It has been a long time since I last posted. Several months in fact. Where have I been? Working. Of course this begs the question of what I have I been working that has stopped me blogging.

StrategyWire is what has stopped me blogging. I have been working hard getting the system up to scratch for the initial release, which has now come and gone. We (MarketClusters) are lucky to be in a position that we had paying clients with the initial release. Of course this creates the (good) problem of having to push further and faster with our development of the platform.

What is StrategyWire? Good question. StrategyWire is an online intelligence platform that organised news, blog posts, statistics etc. using a graphical map to allow users to easily understand their market. In many ways this will be the most interesting period because we will be building on a strong foundation adding in the whizz bang features. Of course we are looking to hire more developers (and analysts).

StrategyWire is part of the growing number of Enterprise 2.0 applications that are starting to appear.

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