Audients
I have not written anything on this blog in over a month. It bothers
me not to write for such long periods of time, since I know that my
influence expands and contracts based on on how often I post.
Relationships require frequency of contact to flourish, whether they be
personal or business oriented; and the relationship between me as the
author and you as the reader is no different.
I am usually mindful of this. Like perhaps many bloggers, I start my
own web browsing experience with a number of tabs tuned into my stats
from Typepad, Feedburner, Measure Map and others. It is a form of self
identification, trying to understand who is paying Attention to me in
terms of how many people end up on my page and how they get here- was
it a reference to me from somebody else’s blog or was it a search
engine query that surfaced one of my prior posts above the algorithmic
fold?
In fact, I know relatively little about you. Maybe you subscribe to
me through my feedburner API, or else you might show a little cookie to
one of my widgets, but I still don’t really get a clear sense of who
you are in any personal, dynamic, emotional way. Email introductions
are more connected since you reveal yourself as an individual with your
own voice. Once in a while I might even run into you at a meeting in
person and you will tell me that you are a long-time reader of my blog.
These are some but not all of the various ways that you express your
presence to me as an active reader. By active I simply mean that you are
telling me directly that you are paying Attention to the information I
am producing.
The combination of ways that I experience your Attention has created a new upper register of consciousness. It is filled with audients:
people like yourself who are tuning into my output and for whom I feel
a certain sense of responsibility. It is exceedingly hard to talk of
you as a coherent group. What do you who landed here from a Wikipedia article on Wall Street soft dollars have in common with you who saw a reference to me
in Fred Wilson’s blog, other than the fact that you are both reading
this page? So instead of thinking of you as a single figure in the
foreground, it is as if you are a constant murmer of feedback behind
me- watching me, no matter what I might be doing, but unavailable to me
no matter how much I might want to pay Attention to you.
The opportunity to understand the behavior of readers and feed this
back to publishers is driving significant product innovation. The most
recent example is MyBlogLog which was purchased by Yahoo! before it had
a chance to demonstrate its viability as a stand-alone product, much
less as a independent business. Lately, tools like this for
understanding the (implicit) Attention of readers are improving
even faster than those for expressing (explicit) personal information of publishers
such as blogging, tagging and rating services.
As I am able to access increasingly fine-grained information about
the nature of my audience, the way in which I express myself here on
these pages begins to reflect that understanding. It is no longer
so simple as writing about something and then waiting for people to
show up who are interested in the subject of the post. Now, many of you
often show up in advance, announcing your interests immediately. If I
dont satisfy your expectations for certain insights while I have your
Attention, then I will lose it to others sources. Without your Attention,
the writing likely stops. And without the writing, so goes this blog
which is a big part of my online identity.
One way of putting it, then, is that the stability of my identity is tied to having access to your Attention statistics.