I have been thinking a lot about attention lately.

At work, several developers complained about having problems concentrating (due to a noise problem), and we plan to improve the work environment by building higher cubicle walls. In my investing activities, I have created a new class of companies that are positioned to convert attention into profits (GOOG and YHOO are at the top of that list). And in my spare time (walking to and fro), I often think about how units of attention could eventually be added to the economic toolbox, along with labor, GDP, and money supply.

I got to writing all of this down because I just read The Looming Attention Crisis on A VC. In this article, Fred quoted Herbert Simon:

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.) Source: The Looming Attention Crisis

I do not see this surplus of options as negatively as Fred does. Humanity has been toiling for millenia so that we may have a few spare moments to think, and pass the results on to the next generation. The only poverty of attention I see is in all of the precious cycles that continue to be spent on survival instead of on some other pursuit higher up Maslow's hierarchy.

As human progress accelerates, we find ourselves having spare cycles, and having more ways to spend these spare cycles. And in these moments, apart from the attention I give at work and at home, I work on tools to help me get even out of my limited attention span. This is because I see technologies such as XML, RDF, and OWL as a way to optimize the ongoing consumption of attention.