Your Attention, Pretty Please?
In March 2007, Alex Iskold wrote about the emergence of the “attention economy”, a marketplace “where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention.” The always-on nature of digital media has increased the scarcity of human attention, and in turn has increased its value. To put it concretely: the more time a company can get you to spend on their website, the more ad revenue they can potentially earn or the higher the likelihood that you’ll purchase one of their products.
I mention the attention economy not to wax theoretic about it, but to share my personal struggle with choosing how to invest my attention. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the purpose of all this technology reading and writing that I do. I enjoy thinking about the topics that I regularly cover. The evolution of web 2.0 and social network is fascinating to me, and it plays well to my geek tendencies. But my brain has been flirting recently with what bloggers have started to call “social media fatigue,” an exhaustion resulting from the overexposure to and overanalysis of those topics.
There’s Hope
However, my passion for social media was reinvigorated last week when I was directed to a web page where a friend was raising money to support her marathon run in honor of her college roommate’s struggle with cancer. I put the link up in my Gmail status and sent an email to some of my fellow classmates to let them know about it. Though I certainly can’t and wouldn’t claim to have made a huge impact, I think a few of the donors that day decided to act because of that simple message and link from a friend. By the end of the day, my friend had raised several hundred dollars, and as of today she has raised over $1,000 from over 25 donors.
Though the story is not unique or especially exciting, it brought home for me how much potential there is for social media. So much good can be done! And people create applications on Facebook that allow you to… throw sheep? Give each other cupcakes? Come on! Luckily, some people have caught on.
Continue reading ‘Attention Invesment’
In conjunction with his participation in the Council on Foundations’ Leadership Summit this week, Taylor is going to be guest blogging for Tactical Philanthropy. The blog’s founder, Sean Stannard-Stockton, has invited Taylor and a handful of others to post their thoughts on different seminars and presentations that they attend. We’ll be sure to include links to his posts here, as well as some excerpts.
As the conference gets ready to begin today, Taylor has introduced himself to Tactical Philanthropy’s readers and described his plans for the week:
I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this excellent blog, as I’m a ‘blog junkie’ and have a great appreciation for the role of social media in spreading information and advancing our work. I’ll be attending sessions at COF focused on the intersection of philanthropy and technology; sessions with titles like “Innovation in Philanthropy,” and “Wired Philanthropy.” I also hope to attend sessions focused on improving the grantmaking process in a way that empowers grantees (without overburdening organizations with unnecessary work), and focuses foundations on strategic thinking and learning.
Check back early and often this week for more of Taylor’s thoughts.
At first blush, FreeRice.com might appear to be more of an SAT or GRE study tool than a web-based philanthropy portal. Visitors to the site identify synonyms for a wide range of words (that increase in difficulty according to success rate), in a never-ending game. For each correct answer, 20 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program–paid for by FreeRice’s advertisers. Unlike other addictive diversions (like this ridiculous game Jarred loves), FreeRice feels wholesome and intellectual…sort of like the geography game, but with a greater purpose.
While FreeRice is by no means a new phenomenon (many of you have likely participated), I was struck by a recent NY Times Magazine piece describing the site’s history (emphasis mine):
“[I]nspired by Jeffrey Sachs’ book “The End of Poverty,” [John] Breen created Poverty.com to encourage first-world nations to give antihunger aid. That site presents a series of names and faces that roll by at a pace illustrating the number of hunger deaths per hour; it’s vivid — and, Breen acknowledges, depressing. So he created FreeRice.com.“
Thoughts after the jump…
Continue reading ‘Philanthropy Online: FreeRice.com’
A few weeks ago I read an article in The Economist about distributed computing, defined by Wikipedia as “a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network.” Basically what you do is download a program that, when you’re not around, uses your computer’s processor (which would otherwise be mostly idle) to crunch data sent to it from a central server. Your computer joins thousands of others crunching data at any one time, forming a giant networked supercomputer with each unit working on a different piece of the puzzle.
What’s the puzzle? It can be anything, or at least anything that requires a whole lot of computer power to figure out. Some puzzles are humanitarian in nature; for example, the World Community Grid (sponsored by IBM) currently has projects tackling cancer, AIDS, and Dengue fever research, as well as African climate change. Others are more geeky (or, should we say, scientific), like the SETI@home project which is searching for extraterrestrial intelligence by analyzing radio telescope data.
So the bottom line is this: while one way to save the planet and contribute to science is through the donation of time and money, another way is through the donation of your computer’s processing power. Why let your computer idly sit while you’re at work or school all day — occasionally using a small processor burst to throw the next picture from your hard drive onto your screensaver, which no one but your dog is watching – when you can have it use its full capacity to solve some of the world’s toughest problems?
The buzz word for this phenomenon is “donating spare cycles.” Basically, a cycle is the process your computer goes through to retrieve a command from its memory and execute that command. It’s how your computer works and, in a way, it’s how our minds work too. A human cycle, then, would be the process our brain goes through to retrieve and process information from our memory. But do humans have spare cycles to donate? You bet.
Continue reading ‘Spare Cycles: Distributing Computing Among Machines and Minds’
In this, the first in a series of posts on philanthropic efforts utilizing the social web, I look to the microcredit site Kiva.org.*
Let me preface my comments by saying that I think the Kiva is a net positive contribution to the web (and microcredit), and that the good it is doing outweighs any of the secondary negatives I describe below. Right now. But my concerns about Kiva are less relevant to the still young and still expanding site as they are to what Kiva could become.
Kiva links willing donors in the developed world with opportunities to capitalize small loans for local entrepreneurs in developing countries. From Kiva’s site:
“Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.“
Continue reading ‘Philanthropy Online: Kiva’
