Twitter and the nature of attention

Not to go on and on about twitter, but it seems like everyone is worried about how and when they are going to make money.
Even Stephen Colbert asked Biz Stone about it on his show last week:

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Jon Fine posted an article on the Business Week site recently linking twitter to the attention economy and stating that attention is not worth anything anymore. He proposes that in the era of newspaper and television advertising, attention is easily measured by ratings and circulation, and since that is harder on the web and social networks like twitter, that attention has lost value:

The value of attention began eroding once web traffic entered into it, since the monetization of attention—audience—is so much harder online. Just ask your local newspaper, if you still have one, or the new York Times. So you have a steady slide downward in what people who produce what we call “content” can get from attention; a TV ratings point or circulation bump is worth way more than a web traffic bump. (This is especially true if the only monetization tools you have are the generic options, like Google AdSense or signing up with the ad networks that are broadly depressing the prices of online ad inventory.)

But hold on a second. Does this really mean that attention has lost value, or that we need different ways of measuring it? TV and newspapers are blunt instruments. An ad in one of these media guarantees nothing except the potential for people to see the ad. With media like twitter and other web content, the same potential is there, but in a more targeted way. Fine wants to equate twitter followers with attention in the same way that newspaper circulation gauges attention, and I'm not entirely sure it works in either case. The attention garnered in older media is just as illusory -- it's just that conventional wisdom has long held that circulation and ratings are metrics for attention, without much to prove it.

When thinking about attention, we need to start thinking about types and degrees of attention instead of just (potential) eyeballs. Consumers are savvy. People don't want to sift through ads to get to content. They don't want the hard sell. But they do want to know about things they might like. I don't have the answers for twitter or for internet marketers in general.

When you read the article, take a look at the comments, where there is some interesting analysis of twitter usage and other models of monetizing attention. Bob Stewart's comment is particularly interesting, as he talks about listening and the value of relationships.