Tag Archives: attention

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After I finish the new (unannounced) book that I’m feverishly writing, I plan to finally pursue “Internet Famous – The rise of micro celebrity and the end of privacy.”

Alexia Tsotsis (disclosure, she’s a dear friend) recently wrote an intriguing article at the LA Weekly entitled, “Is All of Hollywood the Bitch in Twitter’s Sex Tape or Just P. Diddy?”

She links to a recent article written by A.J. Keen, author of the controversial book, Cult of the Amateur, in which he defends TechCrunch and Michael Arrington. In his articke he also observes that technology start-ups have become the “hottest celebrities in America… receiving the same kind of obsessionally intimate coverage from the media that was once reserved for kings of pop like Michael Jackson or Elvis.”

He is a brilliant thinker and writer. If you read his book today, I promise it will practically resonate now that we’re much more humbled by Web 2.0 than when we were initially enthralled by it. However, his quote, if for a moment, opened up the mental floodgates that have held back so many psychological reflections and emotional introspection. I could have started my next, next book, right now. Instead I simply commented on Alexia’s post, and I elected to also share the unabridged version with you here.

“To further expound on Andrew Keen’s perspective, I believe that Twitter is a media darling simply because we, the bitches, decide to tweet about our lives relentlessly. If Twitter is popularized and actively discussed in the media, then it somehow justifies our obsession with sharing everything about who we are, what we love, and what we’re doing. It’s not necessarily technology companies that are becoming the “hottest celebrities in America” because of their shiny new features, it’s us psychologically channeling our subliminal desire for recognition and micro celebrity through these social networks, thus transforming them into the celebrities in which we can live through vicariously. It’s a Freudian form of quietly, but surely provoking varying forms and levels of desired Web-based fame that transcends online and offline through a series of passive-attention seeking behavior”

#internetfamous

Please also read, “Significant” and “The End of the Innocence.”

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by Brian Solis

I’m just returning from my trip to Next09 in Hamburg Germany where I had the privilege to serve as one of the event’s keynote presenters among a cast of some of those whom I most revere. During my session, I discussed how the event’s theme, “The Share Economy,” equated to the Social Economy and the laws of diminishing attention.

We’re constantly struggling and learning how to discover and in turn, personify our place within the perpetually evolving social universe.

It is the ongoing saga of bridging the distances between who we are and who we want to be and furthermore, manifesting this presence outward.

I believe we are creating our online persona with every status update, tweet, video, picture, review, comment, and post, we share. We’re forging networks through a fusion of traditional relationships and friendships and also contextually – following and friending those whom we admire and respect based on their ideas, vision, and experience. It’s how we share, discover and learn. The nature for how we view and establish relationships is evolving before us and eventually we will change how we interact based on the contextual network we’ve built. Most of your “friends” don’t care about your profession exploits. Concurrently, your peers and professional contact are not better off for knowing anything about your personal endeavors.

There will be a collision and ensuing fallout.

What’s next?

Multiple Personality “Order.”

Don’t be surprised if eventually, if for only a short time, we maintain multiple online personas in the networks that are important to us as a consumer and also as a producer.

I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story:

Next09

Andrew Keen

Stowe Boyd

Chris Heuer

Andrea Vascellari

Brian Solis and Dennis Howlett

Nicole Simon, Tobias Kaufmann, Martin Recke

Stephanie Frasco

Stowe Boyd, Matthias Lufkens, Dennis Howlett

Pictures of Hamburg and other things that caught my eye:

For more pictures from Hamburg and Next09, please visit my album on Flickr.

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by Brian Solis via PR 2.0

Following the solo media vs. traditional media race that led Twitter into both relevance and irrelevance, the result is that the carefully guarded community and its unique culture are now permanently altered – for better or for worse.

According to estimates sourced by Engadget Editor-in-Chief Ryan Block, Twitter grew by 1.2 million users simply as a result of the “Oprah-effect.”

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler also explored the process for estimating Twitter’s path into the mainstream.

1.2 million

So, how many new users really joined Twitter as a result of the celebrity-fueled popularity contest?

I’m not sure the answer truly matters. If we explore it from a sociological perspective, I believe that the culture of Twitter has been introduced to a significant event that may indeed shift interaction and behavior overall.

Going into the race, estimates pegged the active userbase anywhere between 5 – 8 million. Now post race and the Oprah-effect, over 1 million people were introduced to the service guided by a “follow me” mentality. This “overnight” expansion represents a potential 10-12% saturation ratio. These new users will participate and build communities around them based on their interpretation of the network as framed by those whom they follow. Remember, we are measured by our last 20 tweets or updates within each social network. Take a look for yourself, www.twitter.com/insertusername

It is what it is. The real question is, what do you want to get out of these connections?

In the end, we are still responsible for creating our own experience within the community and that is one of the true advantages and rewards of Twitter. We foster and cultivate individual ecosystems that bind us contextually.

Competing for Attention

Perhaps what is most interesting and prevalent is the behavior transformation in content consumption that is taking place in “Twitter time” and it’s establishing a new world authority. For many of us, we’re migrating away from destinations and potentially RSS readers as well as our primary source of news, relevant information, pleasant distractions, and trending topics. We’re quickly focusing on Twitter, Facebook News Feeds, FriendFeed and the statusphere as our highly curated and personalized attention dashboards.

As content publishers, producers, and creators, we need to acknowledge, understand, and embrace this critical disruption.

Let’s take a look at Twitter as an example. Before the April’s madness of follower contests, Comscore reported that Twitter had experienced a new record of 9.3 million visitors in March, which represented a 131% jump.

As you can see, the growth curve is practically vertical. And, we’re sure to see yet another surge in growth when April numbers are released.

However, Comscore is also observing what I believe to represent the hope and potential future for traditional media.

When they examined the percentage of visitors to Twitter who also visited the top online news brands and compared it to that of the total U.S. Internet audience, they discovered a strong level of overlap. The result is that the average Twitter user was often 2 and 3 times as likely to visit the top online news brands as the average person. For example, while 17 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience visited CNN.com in March, more than double that percentage (38 percent) of Twitter users did so.

Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and active online social interaction breathe new, and measurable, life into great content where it’s hosted, simply by connecting it to the potentially attentive people where and how they are currently engaged.

This is the Statusphere, a new ecosystem for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and micro-sized content that reverberates throughout social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of viral activity. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually and through the statusphere we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new friendships through the friends of friends effect (FoFs) in the process.

In order to compete for prominence in the future, we must first compete for attention where and when it’s captivated. While we contribute to the evolution of new media and the supporting cultures within each network, we are responsible for what we contribute and what we gain from the interaction. We earn the relationships we deserve.

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by Brian Solis

It’s inevitable. As Twitter experiences growing pains, new entrants will seize the opportunity to provide a more complete and open experience to communicating with and at the people you may or may not know.

The Twitterati are frustrated, worn, and impatient. At this point, any and all alternatives are starting to look attractive. For example, when you’re starving, all food appears appetizing, including the options that you wouldn’t normally consider consuming.

Every now and then however, new applications emerge that offer hope. And with that hope, we also experience confusion, thinning attention, and new communities where interesting conversations transpire between people we know and most likely people we should know – well, and some we shouldn’t.

The latest micromedia/microblogging network to launch is indenti.ca, introduced to us by Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb.

I’m here: http://identi.ca/briansolis

Evan Prodromou, creator of WikiTravel launched Indenti.ca via the CreativeCommons blog and supports CC licenses for the content that flows through the stream.

Identi.ca is built using Open Source, CreativeCommons framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services according to Kirkpatrick.

Like Twitter, it supports Jabber, except on Identi.ca, it works today. It also provides OpenID support which is a feature every social network should support.

However, the list of things it doesn’t support, even the most basic features such as replies and direct messages, is long and potentially dissuading.

The most important story surrounding Identi.ca, is that the platform for which its hosted is open, meaning that we could place the Laconi.ca software on our server to host a dedicated community of our own.

While Identi.ca is extremely promising, the conversation continues to further fragment, which thins our attention and ultimately impacts the girth of any one community – which isn’t always a bad thing.

With every new service that appears, unless of course, you’re already on FriendFeed, our attention is further segmented and distributed. Since Identi.ca feeds can export into FriendFeed, then we contribute to the aggregation and concentration of focus and activity. FriendFeed though, can resemble a firehouse and depending on who you follow, can overwhelm many – especially those seeking conversations in bursts of 140 characters.

If adoption is any indication, Identi.ca is then incredibly promising. But at the very least, it demonstrates that communities are only as loyal as hosts who support them.

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