The more I read about it in various blogs, the more upset I am that I missed Corante’s Symposium on Social Architecture.  Not only would it have been a good chance to catch up with a bunch of old friends, it would have also been a timely immersion in some of the best thinking in new media, especially around what’s being referred to as Web2.0.

I read in Marc’s stone that in one of the panels, Seth Goldstein said: "We all work for Google".  It distills a critical component of new media.  Root focuses on this issue.  As I blogged earlier, I am very curious to follow where it goes.

Is attention a new currency?

This seems to be a question that frequently gets asked in one form or another by old and new media participants.

I believe that attention has become a more liquid asset than before.  50 Years ago, when CBS was broadcasting a show, any individual’s attention to it mattered, but only to a certain extent. Any attention lost by CBS would likely go to ABC or NBC, and conversely, CBS benefited from all lost attention by ABC and NBC.  It was a closed system with no newcomers.

Fast forward to 2005.  Media is extremely fragmented, and getting more so by the minute. Technorati is tracking about 20 21.3 million blogs and that number is doubling every 5 months, according to David Sifry.

Simple economics.  Demand (population) grows slowly, supply is exploding.  Price of content is headed down, which means, the currency with which you can "purchase" content (explicitly here, I am speaking of advertising-supported content) is getting more valuable.  That currency is your attention.

I am  beginning to think about this in further depth.  Fortunately, there are many who must see enough (either economic or intellectual) value in this area and there has been some brilliant thinking.

– Tom Davenport, who may have coined the term "The Attention Economy" has a good book on the topic, co-authored by John Beck.

– Umair Haque explores the impact on the consumer.

– Seth Goldstein, who has recently founded Root has been thinking quite a bit on the topic.

I am very interested to follow the progress of Root.  Seth’s blog’s tagline is "Somewhere between Wall Street and Madison Avenue lies the future of both".  I suspect he’s hit the nail on the head.

Reading Fred Wilson this morning, I found out about Amazon’s new Mechanical Turk service.  (In a side note here, I am realizing that blogs like Fred’s have become my primary source of professional news. The losers include websites and newsletters, including Venture Wire – Alarm:Clock is much better – , atNewYork, Wired, Fast Company and a ton of human capital-related newsletters I had subscibed to in the past.)

Mechanical Turk is brilliant.  It reminded me of Jay Walker’s US HomeGuard, without the big-brothery implications.  (I presume Walker could not sell his idea to the Homeland Security folks, since I have not seen any press on it in a long while.)  I am curious to see if distributed collaboration will work more effectively in micro-chunks, as in the MT system, rather than large projects, as in eLance or Guru.com.

Also, the MT is a nice example how companies that have developed as platforms, especially with financial relationships with their users (such as eBay and Amazon), cnn jump into new areas with their user base.  In no time, Amazon has it’s own PayPal with credits going into its users’ accounts.  Reminds me of how large mobile operators have effectively launched their own currencies (with pre-paid cards and billing relationships with their customers) in developing countries.

Tom Evslin has posted a thoughtful commentary on why he thinks eBay’s made a mistake by acquiring Skype.  His principal points are:

1. In the markets where Skype’s strong, the primary barrier to eBay-type commerce is not lack of communications, but the existence of large "grey markets" where transactions go unrecorded. This fact devalues eBay’s access to new markets argument.

2. Skype’s not yet  "great standalone business" as eBay proclaims in its presentation on the topic.  Evslin thinks Skype is just an asset, with no guarantees of becoming a "business".

I still like eBay’s "friction reduction" thinking.

I have been thinking about eBay + Skype, and it is beginning to come together for me.  eBay’s presentation on the topic helps by putting it in the context of "The Power of 3", and the way they represent it, it makes sense.  I am skeptical of the 1% overlap figure, though.

Adjacent to the synergies they claim, I especially like how they are viewing their challenge as "removing friction".

Friction: Trust -> Solution: Ratings
Friction: Payments -> Solution: PayPal
Friction: Communications -> Solution: Skype