Jellyfish Gets Down to Business

One of the guys at Jellyfish (Brian or Mark, I'm not sure which) has a post on one of the fundamental challenges facing all of us whose work is connected to the attention economy: How do we make it tangible, practical and relevant for typical users? They define their goal as Making the Attention Economy Simple:

[W]hy don’t people think about their attention as a form of currency? In the future I think we will. But let's face it; this is complicated stuff (it is for me anyway). Making it more complicated, a lot of the recent discussion about attention has centered on the concept of getting attention online as a new form of self-worth. Esther Dyson recently commented on this here and others have chimed in (see this post for example, "I can be Googled, therefore I am").

I’d like to stay away from this more esoteric discussion. Although important, I don't think we will get to this level in the attention economy until we show the mainstream how their attention currency can help them obtain more pragmatic benefits. (Andy Lark makes a similar point in his blog here). What kinds of pragmatic benefits am I talking about? For starters, how about the delivery of increased relevance and direct monetary value.

This is what Jellyfish is all about. Our mission is to provide consumers with an easy way to obtain maximum benefit from the most valuable form of attention they provide online: their buying attention. From this frame of reference, attention is better referred to as intention; the intent to do something. Both the present intent of an online consumer to buy some product or service and their historical record of buying intentions is the gold of the Internet. Buying intention is to Internet companies what crude oil is to Saudi Arabia: it is the underlying resource that funds everything.

I have no direct interest in Jellyfish's success, and I have no idea whether their solution will live up to their aspirations. But I applaud those aspirations, and I hope they do succeed. They're right to note the long-term importance of the larger, conceptual discussion about attention, but they're also right to emphasize the immediate importance of effectively communicating to ordinary users just how and why to use these tools. (And I think AttentionTrust can play an important role in that very area.)

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+economy jellyfish making+attention+simple