Conceptual Research and Reflection Project - Part 1

Concept 33

In the era of the ‘attention economy’ readers and users of Internet information must carefully craft, in their own minds, the kind of metadata which will – almost instinctively – ‘fit’ with the metadata of the information sources they want, so that – in the few brief moments of initial exchange, when a seeker of information encounters information being sought, rapid, effective judgements are made that ‘pay off’ in terms of further reading, accessing and saving.

The creation of the internet has helped encourage the concept of the ‘attention economy’, a new model identifying our changing interactions and way of living, which is entirely different from our traditional economic models. Simply put, the massive amount of information available on the internet is making us more discerning viewers, thus our attention is becoming extremely valuable.

Accordingly, the way that our attention is sought in the current world is vastly different from the traditional advertising methods. Early instances of networking via the internet, such as Usenet, allowed new kinds of attention seeking to be developed, such as spam. As we have become accustomed to these kinds of direct approaches, be it a sales pitch or a political message, internet users are now quite fast at identifying metadata that is irrelevant or unwanted to us. But as we become knowledgeable in our avoidance and blocking of this attention, our attention seekers must get more creative.

Increasingly we rely on search engines to assist us in locating the information we are searching for by providing a number of key words to gain a catalogue of possible options in response. Internet users have developed cunning skill at identifying appropriate responses, for example if you are looking to purchase a flight from Munich to Geneva, it is quite natural to select a link to a travel wholesaler, automatically avoiding the alternatives such as a blog discussing the same flight that someone has made in the past. Entering any criteria into a search engine that could has the slightest sexual connotation is widely avoided.

Some fun loving attention seekers have enjoyed utilising our metadata by creating ‘Google Bombs’. This technique was created to influence a search engine’s ranking (in the original case Google) of a webpage within the search results, leading to an unexpected site. It is noted that this is usually done with humorous intent, a famous example is to enter ‘miserable failure’ into Google the top result would lead the user to a website promoting George Bush (now disabled). Whilst generally used in jest, this is a great lesson of how metadata can be manipulated to direct the unwitting searcher or consumer to an unintended site.

Metadata is also increasingly used for fraud. Users are becoming familiar with the metadata associated with Nigerian scams, and phishing, a technique that involves a fraudulent body masquerading as trusted bank or company, seeking credit card or personal details.

Web developers will continue to improve their relevance to metadata searches, and continue to improve the attractiveness of their sites. The attention economy model will really find its relevance, as a single, home based website developer with creative flair may be able to hold as much influence in the internet world as a multinational corporation. For internet surfers, the future metadata will look further into webpages than just relying on text, they will be able to find information relating to graphics, videos and animations. And our attention will become more and more valuable with each development.

Supporting Site 1:
Attent with Serios - http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html

This site is offering a further enhancement to interpreting metadata, by allowing users to attach Serios, a form of online currency, to their emails to enable people and businesses to prioritise their reading. The more Serios attached to an email, the user can assume that the email is more important, relevant or popular then the others all seeking attention in his or her inbox.

This new currency can assist businesses identify the most effective methods of sharing information, and is even being promoted as a reward to employees. At home it can direct readers to popular blogs or information sources. The reports provided by the Attent software can provide metadata analysis and trends to support policy planning. It feels like the new attention economy is creating its own micro-economies.


Supporting Site 2:
Search Engine - http://www.50matches.com/

This is a search engine with a difference – it only searches pages that have already been bookmarked by a social network such as de.icio.us, digg and reddit. This website can seriously cut down the amount of noise received when running a search on one of the commercial engines.

The search returns a maximum of 50 results, so you are not bombarded with hundreds of pages of increasingly less relevant material. An advantage is that the results are made from sites recommended by humans instead of machines crawling the net and returning a meta data matches with no regard for the quality of the content of the site.