The War of Attention and Web Services

The War of Attention.

Scobel's my man this week. He says Silicon Valley got my attention: the future of web businesses after speaking with Steve Gillmore, a whole story in itself. Scobel pays attention.

Steve Gillmore who blogs at ZDnet and who started attentiontrust.org calls it the Attention War. You own yourself and your data, but who owns your attention? Do you? Or do the search engines and merchants? This opens up a whole new territory and not just for lawyers what with talk of cartels, attention meta data both in and out of clouds. And who are the combatants? Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Skype.

Could it be that Microsoft is paying attention? On Tuesday, Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie will likely shake up the industry with details of their rapid move toward the attention economy. The key to this reboot is the understanding that page rank, and the fundamental search methodology of people looking for information, is about to be flipped on its head to a new model where the information is provided gestures of intention that allow it to target the user. The key is the same fundamental that drives RSS: the invitation on the part of the user to address information inward.

Back to the future of web services and Scobel

Here’s the new Silicon Valley business plan. You build a service. Add a Buzz Gadget (Google/MSN/Yahoo are working on more to come). Add a Monetization Gadget (Google calls that their Web Advertising Platform — MSN and Yahoo are working on their own). Mix and mash and we have a business. Guess what? This business will be very profitable. Why? You develop it cheaply and if you did your job right, a boatload of people come and visit your service, like it, keep coming back, and hopefully they click on the ads (the more they click on the ads, the more money you make).

It's attention to the needs of individual customers through the power of capturing little bits of information that coalesce into the delivery of more of what I want and that continues to evolve as more data about me is collected by search engines to deliver ever more thrilling stuff and very targeted ads all through the power of artificial intelligence.