Bribe Economy

Esther Dyson at the Churchill Club's Top Trends Event:

Dyson got the biggest laugh by suggesting a business model for Sunnyvale-based Friendster, the popular social networking service and a company that has yet to collect any revenue from its users.

Populated by lonely singles looking to line up dates, Friendster should start a personal gift registry, Dyson said. The bottom line would be: ``If you want to date me, this is what you've got to buy me.''

But it may not be a joke. Matt passes on this quote from Bruce Sterling...

"It seems to me there's something direly wrong with the Information Economy. It's not about data, it's about attention. In a few years you may be able to carry the Library of Congress in your hip pocket. So? You're never gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die long before you access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important -- increasingly important -- is the process by which you figure out what to look at. This is the beginning of the real and true economics of information -- not who owns the books, who prints the books, who has the holdings. The crux today is access, not holdings. And not even access itself but the signposts that tell you what to access -- what to pay attention to. In the Information Economy everything is plentiful -- except attention."

Comments

[Abe]

Was about to say Sterling was ripping off Goldhaber, but then I realized that quote is from 1992! Perhaps Goldhaber is ripping off Sterling...

In anycase if you haven't read Goldhaber's "The Attention Economy" [ http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/ ] it's a overlooked classic.

[Sean Murphy]

This reminded me of a Mar/94 article by Paul Saffo in Wired Magazine "It's the Context, Stupid."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/context.html
Three key observations from the article:

"It is not content but context that will matter most a decade or so from now. The scarce resource will not be stuff, but point of view."

"The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching, and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace."

"In a world of hyperabundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources"