NerdShit Asks: Do You Really Have Time to Read This?

At the bottom of the introduction to each post on NerdShit is a wordcount and an estimate of the time it will take to read the entire post:

In an interesting post about the attention economy, Fat Knowledge notes that NerdShit's time estimate, "allows you to see how 'expensive' in time it will be to consume." Of course, how we value our time relative to a given experience good is highly individualized. Nerdshit doesn't know how fast I read (I'm 38, but I've been told I read at a 41-year-old level), how much I value my time (which is highly contextual), and how much I value their content.

But that little bit of data expands our awareness of the demand that will be placed on our time and attention by that experience and allows us to weigh the investment against the expected return. What I really want is a system that will provide me with a personalized set of metrics, but it's a start.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data nerdshit fat+knowledge