This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.
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Attention has always been a hot topic, and even more so, it seems, over the past year. Everybody wants to know what the masses are paying attention to. Traditionally, attention has been measured by things like TV ratings, box office receipts and record sales. More recently, the attention of citizen media (i.e. bloggers) is measured by services like Technorati, PubSub, Digg and IceRocket.
People are starting to create attention maps. The map above measures attention, but not the attention of the masses. Instead, it measures the attention being paid to a particular country by various news services (e.g. Google News).
I can get a similar attention map for this blog via Site Meter, my statistics software. The map to the right shows where my most recent site visitors were located.
Why is this interesting? Well, first of all, the maps are cool to me. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before savyy developers start creating maps of everything (they already are actually) using things like Google Maps, etc.
And it’s also interesting from a brand/relationship building perspective. If I can look at a map and see where my readers are or where my podcast listeners are, I can pay back some of my attention to them. Or if I’m an advertiser, I can even tailor an ad or special offer to a specific area of the world. Somebody please give me a map my last 1000 podcast downloads. In the meantime, this post is dedicated to my last 20 or so readers in New South Wales Australia.
The fact that we can measure and map attention is probably not as interesting as the fact that the information is becoming more accessible to people like me; people without a six-figure marketing research budget.
(Via Smart Mobs)