Two quotes of interest, from the Attention Trust blog, and copied from the Wall Street Journal:

Esther Dyson on the Intention Economy

” I think you’ll see a fundamental shift in the balance of power towards individuals. Individuals will declare what kinds of vendors they want sponsoring their content, and then those vendors will have the privilege of appearing, discreetly, around the user’s content. There will be much less “advertising” and much more communication to interested customers. Advertisers will have to learn to listen, not just to track and segment customers.

So the message to marketers is: If you can’t sell your product (assuming it’s already in the market), fix the product! Don’t try to change the situation by advertising.

Consumers will publish wish lists for marketers to scan. Also, their choices will be influenced by their friends’ comments much more than by marketers’ messages.

On the other hand, it will be much harder for consumers to get free content anonymously, because advertisers will want to know more about the people they are paying to reach. In many cases, whether email or ads, users may even get a share of the marketer’s payments. (See AttentionTrust.org or my op-ed on Goodmail or my post on Release 1.06.)

This makes sense from advertisers’ point of view, but it has a social downside: People who buy Porsches can earn more from marketers than people who buy used cars. People without money will find it harder and harder to get free content — which means a role for nonprofits in funding access to content for all.”
Esther Dyson on how the attention economy differs from the intention economy

“There’s a lot of, er, attention being paid right now to the so-called “attention economy.” Indeed, O’Reilly [Media Inc.] subtitled its recent (March) Web 2.0 conference “The attention economy.” It even featured author Michael Goldhaber, who wrote about the concept some 14 years ago for my newsletter Release 1.0.

But people are generally missing the point; Mr. Goldhaber has trouble getting attention for the mirror he is holding up. Most commentators see the attention economy as the intention economy, where attention = intention (to buy). That version of the attention economy is all about sales leads and monetization of attention, and radical ideas include the notion of users getting paid for their attention, as I mentioned earlier, whether in the form of surfing behavior or a willingness to read email.

But Mr. Goldhaber’s thesis is far more radical, and people aren’t really paying … attention yet. It’s that attention has its own intrinsic value, independent of money. People go on the Web in search of attention; they don’t want to give it as much as get it. People judge their own worth by their number of friends (Friendster) or fans (MySpace) or business contacts (LinkedIn). They may tell you that they’re seeking business success, but oftentimes they seem to value contact lists in the thousands for their own sake.

While adults worry about privacy, kids seek attention. They post poetry, photos, exaggerated tales of personal exploits, music in order to create an online presence that garners attention.

Doesn’t this all come down to money in the end? you might ask. Don’t kids buy things in order to get attention? Sure. And in the same way, the new financial-industrial economy all came down to food and shelter as we made the transition from an agrarian, feudal economy. But there are new dynamics worth noting. Most users are not trying to turn attention into anything else. They are seeking it for itself.

For sure, the attention economy will not replace the financial economy. But it is more than just a subset of the financial economy we know and love.”Â