I spoke yesterday about the importance of networking your blog and one its components Attention:

What is the golden rule to get a person’s attention? Pay some attention to them! The same rule applies online. If you comment on a lot of other blogs and websites, and when I say comment I mean intelligent, conversation participation comments (express your opinion folks, it’s not hard), then you open up the doors for other people to get to know you and your site. Write some content on your blog that mentions some of the big blogs and you may just get the attention of the author. The more bloggers that know you, that track you through RSS, the more likely you will get a link back when your brand new article goes up.

Well, Attention is getting a lot more attention (sorry) with the explosion of blogs and blogging. A new organization Attention Trust.org is beginning to get a lot more attention.

But what exactly is attention and why is it important? Think about it this way. You just visited this post here at Bloggers For Hire and you are now reading it. I would assume (and hope) that you are giving it your full attention. Now, lets say you decide to comment on this entry - that is even more attention you are giving to me. According to Ed Batista, Executive Director of Attention Trust "whenever we pay attention to something (or ignore something), attention is a potentially valuable resource, and we all have right to own, manage, and exchange our data and receive value in return." This idea can be confusing, but I harken back to comparing it to your time. Everyone can understand that time is valuable, so in this sense, your attention takes up your time in its most simplistic form.

Jeff Jarvis speaks at length on Buzz Machine (which I was proudly linked to during the 2004 Athens Olympics) about the "wisdom of the crowd", as he calls it:

The thing that’s new about this new world is that we don’t just consume. In fact, the act of consumption is now an act of creation. There are so many examples. When I search on Google, I am finding stuff for me but when I click, I am adding to the wisdom of the crowd that makes Google more effective for every searcher who follows me. When I consume content and want to save it on Del.icio.us or other such services, that’s an individual act, but the tags we create together yield amazing wisdom of the crowd that can be useful in helping people discover content, in organizing the web around topics again, in improving search results, and even in improving ad performance.

This is strong. Jarvis has hit on exactly what is the intent of the web was from the day it was invented. Networking. With blogging, tagging, Technorati, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and RSS, the internet and the world wide web, in my opinion, are finally being used to their potential and to the vision of their creators.

Jarvis continues:

So who owns that collected wisdom of the crowd? I’d say the crowd does. Others merely borrow it if they continue to have the trust of the crowd and if they pay dividends back to that crowd. And if those others try too hard to control that wisdom, to limit its use and the sharing of it, then they not only reduce the value of it — under the theory (and it’s still a theory) that a smaller crowd is less wise — but they also risk turning away the crowd that creates this value.

Om Malik, Senior Writer for Business 2.0 magazine talks on his Broadband Blog directly to attention and networking and its relation to time:

I wondered out loud, if this culture of participation was seemingly help[ing] build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset - time.

We all have two things in common while on the web, the fact that the sites we are viewing have our time and our attention. With these two items, the web can potentially become a better networked medium, and hopefully by giving your attention to others you will be included in it.

Technorati Tags: Attention Trust

Scott Goldblatt also write daily at his personal blog The Parental Olympian