Many bloggers, and those who haven't staked a portion of their livelyhood on it, are currently asking questions about how to deal with how attention is fragmenting. Everything splinters when splicing is so easy. As attention shifts to Twitter and a thousand things this creates opportunities.
Like hosting the comments on microcontent elsewhere. Tis' natural. But it fragments conversation, which hosts want to own.
And then it creates a new opportunity of aggregating all these disparate conversations, and making them relevant for participants, which is hard when they are across so many modalities. Jeff Nolan noted to me today that we need a standard, at least in practice, for making comment threads discoverable and manageable. Oh, what a fractured web we weave without it.
The pattern is a creation of a modality, prompting more opportunity for conversation if not part of the modality, which can be anywhere, which prompts the need for aggregation in a way that makes sense to the originator of the message, at the least. As we struggle to find solutions to all this experimentation, the inbox is again overloaded while we search for the right serendipity feed.
Such creates the need for FriendFeed, which people mention here for often reasons they don't understand. Lifestreaming, like what we found in Dandelife and Jaiku, has already tested that what matters is what you do with it. Most don't know what we do with it and pretend its a new thing they do. But what does it do for attention, iterations from now, and memory, and sparking conversation?
