Conserving Your Limited Attention

Nick Bradbury: Conserving Your Limited Attention:

When I hear someone complaining about all the feeds competing for their attention, I have to wonder why they don’t just unsubscribe from most of them. Are their aggregators not helping them find the feeds they’re paying the least attention to so they can figure out which ones to unsubscribe from? I regularly weed out the feeds that I don’t spend any time with, so catching up with my unread posts every morning doesn’t turn into an all-day affair.

Been there, done that. it works. It’s sometimes eye opening, too. For instance, take your list of so-called “A list” bloggers and unsubscribe from them on the assumption that if they say something interesting, other people in your feeds will point to what they say, right? And then see which ones people actually talk about and are generating content that starts discussions, and which ones are A-listers because, well, they’re A-listers.

I’ve been weeding my feeds for years. My comfort level for how many feeds I like having is around 400. When it gets to 450, or I get really busy, I start feeling like I’m spending too much time reading and not enough time doing, so I start parsing out feeds I’m not that interested in. it’s the garden hose that works for me…

In my case, part of my “feed weeding” involves getting rid of a bunch of single-topic feeds, then subscribing to one feed that points out the interesting articles in those feeds. Scoble’s link blog, for example, saves me from subscribing to a ton of tech-related feeds. In this situation, Scoble assumes the position of an editor (and I do the same thing with my link blog).

yeah — what he said. I don’t have time to parse all of those feeds, so when I can find someone who does it for me — that’s worth something.

In fact, I suggested just this kind of model a few years back:

Chuqui 3.0.1 Beta: The commercialization of weblogs…:

A second way, but one I think depends more heavily on micropayments, is that of the data miner — the person who either has a focus on a specific topic (whether it’s alternative music, nanotechnology, or science fiction) and who mines the data stream to supply content on that topic — not so much writing on a topic as acting as a filter on what’s written, much as a magazine editor chooses what stories to publish, and filters the submission stream into a magazine their subscribers want to read… (a third option, somewhat a variant of this second, is the “miner by request”, who’s specialty is finding what they’re contracted to find, but in this case, a weblog is more a marketing vehicle than a distribution tool…)

Only at the time, I saw micropayments as the way to fund a good data miner or editor; micropayments? dead and buried, and replaced by an advertising model. In retrospect, gee, what a surprise: people are not all that interested in paying a small value for something useful, but will happily put up with ads if the ads pay for it and they get it “for free”. Now, where have we seen these models before?

Oh, yeah, Television. Micropayments are, in their way, the net equivalent of PBS, and the Google Adsense model is network television. And look which one succeeded in television? History teaches us another lesson — through hindsight. again…

To some degree, this is the financial model that Jason calcanis and nick denton both figured out how to monetize, and the most popular blogs on the net today aren’t ones that generate a lot of original content, but are instead what I call “survey” blogs, ones that act as these filters to “stuff” all across the net.

to some degree, we’re reinventing the publisher model; too often, people look at a book publisher or a magazine editor as someone who limits access to content. “The net will set us free”, because everyone can self-publish now. But that doesn’t obsolete Sturgeon’s law, and that’s the forgotten part of an editor or publisher’s job: to filter out the crap and help you find the stuff worth reading. The slush pile exists for a reason, and we’re now re-inventing this online — the big difference is that the editorial selection process is no longer gated by who owns the presses, so you can have a LOT of editors, each building their own niche and audience — and through advertising, generate an income commensurate with how well they do their job for their readers.

And THAT is a really great thing — it’s much easier for voices to get heard, but we’re starting phase 2 of that process: that we still need people to help us find those interesting voices.

there IS still a need for editors, and you’re now seeing this category emerge and become financially viable for folks. For me, none too soon.

(hat tip, Jeremy)

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