Vacuum

I'll miss Google Reader, but it's no longer how people read this site

If my Google Analytics reporting is to be behaved, the peak of Google Reader usage for me was in mid 2008, and by early 2010 it had been reduced to background noise. I can understand based on this graph (and perhaps millions of other graphs like it) that it might be time to call it quits.

It looks like from other charts (that I won't show here) that Twitter picked up the slack, as did Facebook. 

Google's "sunset" announcement for Google Reader says that you can get your data out; I'm sure that at least one service will appear to let you load it in and carry on reading.

mybloglog is officially dead

You have been identified as a customer of Yahoo! MyBlogLog. We will officially discontinue Yahoo! MyBlogLog effective May 24, 2011. Your agreement with Yahoo!, to the extent that it applies to the Yahoo! MyBlogLog, will terminate on May 24, 2011. 

It really died a few years ago, but this at least makes it official. I really liked the service when it was under active development, especially because it tracked click-through on links quite effectively; I am sure there is some way to replicate that using Google Analytics, but I didn't get far enough into the new event tracking parts of it to make it work.

How do you measure and value attention?

We measure things that are easy to measure about media, like

• time on page, time on site
• click through rate
• conversion rate to some desired action
• frequency of interaction
• responsiveness of interaction
• hot spots that are getting lots of attention
• "lag", whatever that is, but everyone knows what it is

In general, media that have small amounts of lag are good for gaming, because you can play many small bets and iteratively define a better result. As the amount of lag increases, the attention games change, and you start to get out of the realm of reality-based feedback and into the realm of ROI fictions, and systems that have enormous expensive command and control infrastructures. 

It’s one thing to hack people’s attention about tomorrow if you start working on it today, and something very different to plan a campaign that results in their attention (or the fulfillment of their desire) 6 or 12 or 18 or 120 months hence. 

Originally written for Kevin Doyle Jones, and published obscurely in 2007; rescued and republished with only minor edits 3 years hence.