the Onda

Just came back from Etech where I failed to have a single "wow" moment. The closest I think I came was during the demo of the multi-touch interface the first day of the show. Overall, I left San Diego feeling like something was lacking.

Don't get me wrong, there is plenty to like about Etech as a venue. I got to catch up with Doc (more on him later) which is always great fun. I had lunch with Dave Sifry, who I'd only known through the blogosphere, and found him to be quite an inspirational guy (and like Doc a very decent closet shutterbug). I attended a scaling webapps fast-and-cheap tutorial put together by Cal Henderson from flickr which was great geek porn and perhaps the most honest, well thought-out presentation on the architecture of a large website that I have ever attended. And, of course, Joel is always entertaining enough to be worth paying attention to even if he's only half-right most of the time.

As I thought about why I found the contents of the conference somewhat lacking, it occurred to me that the blogosphere may be in fact responsible for the lack of "wow" moments. After all, most of the presenters at the conference are prolific bloggers, so most of the big ideas get out well ahead of their talks and company announcements. Back in the late 1990s at a conference like PC Forum, you were hearing these things for the first time (perhaps this is what is driving the interest behind the un-conferences which seem to place all of the emphasis on the attendees).

But upon further reflection it struck me that there was something else missing. The big theme of the conference was supposed to be "The Attention Economy" and the presentations, company pitches, etc. were cast in that mold. And yet, despite the fact that I am an avid listener of the Gillmor Gang, I now have no idea what the attention economy is all about. For a while, I thought I did: I thought the attention economy was all about the stream of metadata that came from using web applications. From clickstreams to search terms, we spend virtually all of our time online generating this metadata, and it often seems frustrating that it gets trapped at whatever property we happen to create it on.

But it turns out that the attention economy is about more than this metadata. It's also about money, and time, and intelligence augmentation, and gestures. It's about Web 2.0 APIs, and mash-ups. It's about event calendars that you use to schedule events you wish could take place. It's about distributed identity management. And most of all, it seems to be a suspension of disbelief around the need for business models that deviate from the AdWords template.

On the plane back from San Diego I was thinking about how this was what really bothered me about the conference, the fact that attention seemed like a funky euphemism for eyeballs instead of a synonym for metadata when to my great delight I ran into this piece that Doc posted on the need for an Intention Economy instead of an Attention one. He just nails it, most of all because he puts the user at the center of the value proposition. I think that this is what was missing from most of the Etech company presentations-- good old product management that focuses on what the user gets out of all of this (I saw in this post a funny term for it "Etech gets Ninged").

An example: Adam has been trying to work on a better type of aggregator. He is starting from a clear customer pain and trying to define a product around it. It's really as much about attention as anything else from the conference but because he's started from the customer pain, it feels a lot more concrete and tangible.

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