MIT Technology Review just did a nice article about attention, focusing on the presentations at ETech, starting with Seth Goldstein’s work on Attention Trust and Root Markets:
“I was working with Josh Schachter in 2004 and heard him summarize what a tag was,” says Goldstein, refering to the human-applied word label used to sort Internet content on Schachter’s site, del.icio.us”. “He said a tag is just crystallized attention, and it stuck with me.”
“Attention” is one of the important vectors for thinking about “collective intelligence,” which, as I’ve just noted, is really the lynchpin of web 2.0.