Fred Wilson has a nice post on the impending attention crisis, courtesy the explosion of media, particularly online:
Most of us have day jobs. Many of us have families. So we have a
limited amount of attention left. And I suspect we are consuming most
of it with what we’ve got on our plates today.So where does the attention come for the next wave of blogs and web
services? From the old ones, I guess. In my case, its not going to
come out of my family’s attention allocation or my firm’s.So attention is a zero sum game and if we are creating (at an
exponential rate?) more uses of attention, then we are facing a looming
attention crisis.
That’s why we think that The Daily You is the most valuable feature we’re going to offer– We’ve designed our site so that we’ll take up as little of your attention as possible, while connecting you to people, places, events and businesses that impact your daily life.
Sure, Yahoo! and other national players are trying to do this– but they can’t yet meaningfully get to a hyperlocal level. There’s the quandry– National sites have a "last mile" problem. Just last week I was talking to the CEO of a company with reason to know what kind of mainstream site RSS feeds people subscribe to most often — And the number of subscriptions is directly proportional to the level of locality.
