Why you don’t really read this blog.

The number one reason people don’t spend time reading attention industry is pretty straight forward: it’s 90%+ text.

The comment I most hear regarding the site, the theme, and the content is that it’s ‘very text heavy’, which I can see is disconcerting for some people.  I also tend to be more than slightly verbose, and prefer paragraphs to bullet points.  There are a few reasons for this:

1. I think while writing - a paragraph helps me shape an idea, a bullet point is only good for expressing it.
2. I’m dealing with fairly complex ideas and concepts - simplifying them too much would defeat the point.
3. I’m working in the theory of a fairly specific niche - my assumption is that people who care will be interested in reading, those that don’t aren’t my audience.

There are a few more reasons, but those are the most justifiable ones.

Beyond that, I legitimately like writing.  And I assume that the majority of people who will connect with what I’m saying will also like writing.

In the end, I’m making a conscious decision not to let a desire for an audience dictate the type of content I create.  This is not something I’d be likely to advise anyone trying to build a following or a business to do.  Luckily, I’m only interested in exploring and sharing ideas.

I’ll be in NYC from Thursday May 20th

If you’d like to get in touch, check the about page.

(I’ll be leaving Monday May 24th.  So, don’t wait.)

This is post #251 for attention industry.

It’s been a little less than a year.  I’m pretty happy with it, so far.

Explaining my absence.

I haven’t been blogging much.

Mostly because I’m switching jobs (and to a certain extent, industries), and as such, I’ve been both busy and distracted preparing for my last days.

Expect some extensive bloggery next week, when I’m on staycation, and I run out of TV to catch up on.

My Stance on LinkedIn (Simpler.)

LinkedIn is an online resume tool with a thin social veneer. In terms of updates that you can expect to receive, they generally come in the flavour of ‘person X is now connected to person Y’, ‘person Z has recommended person Y’ and ‘You may know person Z’.

If you’re connected to someone, you can send a message to them, or read their profile. You can also pay to send a message to someone you aren’t connected to, which, in my personal opinion, probably irritates the hell out of highly influential individuals on LinkedIn.

Beyond irritating people you could not get in touch with otherwise, I’m not sure what LinkedIn adds to the business-focused networking space. I don’t consider it actively social, although I’ve seen there are many people who disagree with me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with LinkedIn, except that I think it has used it’s social veneer as a means of attracting attention from people who see the buzz value in social, but don’t want to actually undergo the shift in social norms that happens in social media. My issue with this is that I think this attention is a large part of LinkedIn’s assumed value.

Within 5 years, I think a veneer of social, without the attendant shift of social norms and interaction, will stop being interesting enough to inflate the value of something.

If this is the case, LinkedIn now replicates having a resume online, and organizes your business-only contacts in a way that does not encourage personal or social communication. This might be useful for ‘pure’ networking, ie, intentionally seeking out people of use to you. I, personally, don’t think that ‘pure’ networking is a good way to build valuable professional connections. I feel the same way about a paid invite to email someone.

So in LinkedIn, I see a purported social network that isn’t optimized for social connection, that replicates resume function, and that doesn’t add anything new to the traditional, or dominant, hiring process.

This was the main point I had regarding my (pure guesswork) 5 year limitation on LinkedIn being relevant; that there is about a 5 year window where same old thing masked as innovative can still inflate value by leveraging a trend. And I think, in terms of it’s value as a technology and not as a culture, social is often applied as a trend.

Do I have an issue with the traditional hiring process? Yes, and many people do. This probably led to me rambling more than I should have in my previous post.

Hopefully this response was more well thought out.

Channel You is Outdated.

The concept of a single channel for a single personality is outdated.  When such a thing was an issue of cost, or of effort, you could argue that each person only needed on journal, one outlet, one website.

The amount of money, effort, and time needed to establish separate channels is now negligible.  And there is still (perhaps always) value in segmentation.

For the last several years, I’ve divided my web presence into two streams.  One professional (currently exemplified by this blog) and one personal (currently my other tumblr).  I realised this morning that it doesn’t make a ton of sense to stop there.

I’ve decided to expand into a new stream, focusing on my love of / obsession with fashion, both style / clothing, and as a business.  There’s no reason posts won’t overlap between Attention Industry, and Blank Tie (new blog), but there’s no guarantee that will happen often.

Why create a hybrid channel that will inevitably alienate a portion of readers, when I can create something with more laser focus?

Channel You is outdated.  You are more complex than a channel.  You are a network unto yourself.

Act like it.

Public Service Announcement.

Due to my work-related duties during TIFF, I’ve been more or less a ghost for the past week, and will be until the end of the week.

Apologies for the lack of posting. In other news, my Tumblarity is apparently inversely related to the number of unread RSS items I have.

Lost Data.

It appears that I thoroughly screwed up installing the Google Analytics tracking code in Attention Industry when I updated the theme, added comments, etc.  As a result, I have no clue what happened in the last month, traffic-wise.

While I don’t use this information for anything other than to refine my knowledge of what people find interesting, it depresses me to have lost that data.  I feel as though some fairly interesting stuff happened here in the month of August, and I won’t get to find out if anyone else thought it was interesting as well.

It appears that my allegiance to the ‘measure and refine’ school of planning has seeped into my non-business efforts, as well.