Information Architecture and Attention
It seems to me the challenge of Social Software is to take an enormous, perhaps ultimately infinite, resource -- the information, thoughts, beliefs, insights, and viewpoints of, well, everybody -- and make it useful for a small, finite, resource -- the attention of everybody, measured in hours or, I suppose, with the fractured attention span of the modern human, "focused" hours.
An interesting comment from the audience was that the "I go get" web is turning into a "come to me" web.
And even the "come to me" web is overwhelming, as Fred so poignantly illuminates in this post on the Looming Attention Crisis.
With the amount of attention we have available to "pay" being finite, and presuming the value of the information on the web is not evenly distributed, i.e., some information, viewpoints, and opinions are more valuable than others, how do we properly organize the latter to inform the former?
[Tags: CoranteSSA Corante SocialSoftware]
