Notes from this mornings sessions are a bit slow due to the combined lack of decent coffee and a WiFi connection that is going down more often than a mid-western cheerleader. It's funny, this is the 3rd eTech I've been too and each year there are tons more people and the exact same connectivity issues. They are accounting for more people by providing more coffee and bagels, bandwidth should be just as important if not more so.
All that aside, there's a lot of talk about attention given that it's the theme of this years conference. Seth Goldstein from Attention Trust talked quite a bit about it this morning in his track called Root Markets: Applications for the New Attention Economy. The back channel feeling that I got was that people seemed to think what he was doing was very important, but people still didn't get exactly why. Rael even said on #etech "it took me a while to really grok with seth is up to... it's really worth another gander if you've looked but been a little confused" - the thing that made the most sense to me was that they are trying to find solutions for who you want to pay attention to (friends, family, etc) vs. who you want to keep your attention from (spam, junk, scams, etc).
Dave Sifry from Technorati expanded on that shortly after by pointing out that "time" is really the most valuable thing out there considering that we only have so much of it so spend, there's no way to get any more of it, and once it's spent there's no way to get any of it back. A lot of the things they are working on, such as tags, allow you to take advantage of time that other people have already spent to save your own. This is a reoccurring theme as well - part of how cool something like flickr or craigslist is comes from the time the users have spent on it and the info they have put into it. Classified photos are more valuable than ones with no way to find them, and if someone else has done the classifying for you, even better. Taking advantage of this info, and combining it with social networks allows you to find things online that everyone is talking about, or just things that your friends are talking about. A very valuable distinction if you only have a few minutes to spend looking.
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