Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Om Malik is upset that the Indian blog ban is getting more attention than the Indian train bombings. Nishant and I beg to differ. It is perfectly natural that bloggers are more concerned about themselves than about a distant event. If you sat in a Mumbai train and listened to the conversation, we bet they’ll be talking about the bombings, not blogs.

If bloggers were talking about the bombings without either first-hand experience or new insight, that is when you should be calling them pretentious. The fallacy is in assuming that bloggers or the blogosphere have a greater purpose than navel-gazing.

A sticky attention economy is inherently biased towards acquiring new subscribers than keeping existing ones happy. Witness cell phone providers falling over themselves to provide incentives to new users, while they think nothing of ripping off existing ones. Witness web service providers getting excited over new services, while ignoring the flaws in existing ones.

It’s in the nature of the system. Getting the attention of new subscribers is hard, so extra effort must be made there. The attention’s sticky however, so once you have them, you can afford to ignore them. They won’t go away unless really pissed.

Now if only there was a way to demand attention, a way that is obvious enough to enough people for their collective dissent to blip loud. A Petition Online where you don’t have to invite people to sign your petition because they’re all writing their own. Where you don’t even have to bother writing one — because you didn’t think it was significant enough — but one gets put together anyway. Nothing I’ve seen quite does it. They’re trying. For whoever can build and get subscribers to such a framework, there’s a fortune to be made.

Take Dan Gillmor. I didn’t have the capacity to track his blog, but kept hearing of him from others. His citizen journalism initiative and upcoming book were the toast of the ’sphere. And then the linking dried up. One day, a year later, I wondered “Hey, what happened to Dan Gillmor? How come nobody talks about him anymore?”

Turns out he closed his startup because they couldn’t find a business model. Now that he was no longer on the cusp of doing something remarkable, the chatter died. This isn’t to belittle his efforts. His work at the new Center for Citizen Media must be as remarkable as what he tried at the failed venture, but doesn’t seem to be getting the same attention.

In this so called attention economy, must one necessarily be an exhibitionist to be relevant?