When I posted Advertising to the Community: Is PageRank a Good Model for Social Media? a couple of days ago, I was working in a vacuum. I was responding to some degree to the infamous BusinessWeek article, and to the comments Matt Rhodes made on the idea of PageRank being used to rate social media participation.

Turns out I am not alone in criticizing this simplistic approach rating the importance and relevance of conversations and community. Mark Earls comments on the power of super-users [here], and how the focus on these influencers misses the entire point of community and conversation. John Bell of the Digital Influence Mapping Project and Ogilvy points out that the relationships in social media and online communities are inherently more complex than creating a value based on the number of interactions someone has with a community [here].

This conversation is becoming very interesting. There are a lot of very bright people who are considering many different approaches to ranking the importance of a conversation or a community based not only on who is participating, but how engaged people are.

If communities or conversations are run and directed by a select group of people, then they are called dictatorships or lectures. Breaking down, rather than erecting, barriers is why social media is such a powerful force.

Tags: John Bell, Mark Earls, Matt Rhodes, Ogilvy, online communities, social media, social media participation

Since I migrated the blog back to my own servers a few days ago, I have realized something: I have fallen back to my old habit of watching the hit count.

This is weird, considering the lack of interest I had in my blog and its stats over the last year or so. But having my baby back home where I am in charge gives a sense that I should pay attention. That I need to know what’s happening.

In 2005, when I started doing this, I used to watch my hit count religiously, maniacally. Sort of goes with the bipolar, but I digress. In 2008, we are obsessed with followers, and the Slashdot like addiction to being the first to report some breaking (planted?) news item.

So, after three years of blogging, I see that the online communities haven’t progressed much beyond hit counters, page views, or followers. And online cred is a insular and self-perpetuating thing. You draw attention to yourself, you get comments, more people follow you, and more people feed you, you have more to say, more people follow you…and on, and on.

I am not saying that this is good, or ill. I am as much a traffic whore as the rest of the world. I just realize that we are all after the same goal - attention. That was the whole idea behind the Attention Economy, a term I don’t hear as much as I did 2 years ago.

With FriendFeed and Twitter, we live in the Attention Economy. With 200 channels in my basic cable package, TV is a passive Attention Economy, controlled by the PVR and the TorrentSphere. Satellite Radio forces us to make choices.

Be it hit-counts or PVRs, we all crave attention, knowing full well how limited the attention-span is. We don’t want be to waste our time, but we want to attract that of others.

Attention produces an unbalanced online economy. We can do many things to control the incoming flow. We can also work very hard to expand the outgoing flow. But for most of us, the outgoing flow remains a trickle, maybe even a fine mist.

So where does the power in the Attention Economy lie? With the off-switch.

And we all have one.

How do you use yours?

Tags: attention, Attention Economy, followers, hits, online communities, social media, unbalanced online economy