What are Blogs for

I have had a hard time understanding why blogs were so different from usual forums. George helped me build my own answers (in words and concept I understand).

Forums are made for building and following conversations under a defined topic or issue. It's the ideal tool for showing the thread of what's going on so that everyone can get in very easily.

The purpose of the blogs is different. I would say they are made to connect people through their published thoughts and content, and help them interact. Blogs are people linkers.

Towards an attention economy of CI

“I didn't adequately address ‘...the bipolarity opposition between the Net and the Self.’  Note to self, need another framework to explain how self-serving utility pursuits result in emergent value.  Note to Net, feel free to chime in.” from
Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Ross, I don’t have a framework but am happy to contribute to its emergence through the dialogue that your reply to Tim’ Oren’s comments on Ecosystem of Networks, I hope will trigger in blogosphere and beyond.

I think you’re at the heart of attention economics’ core issues, and your conversation with Tim has the potential to build momentum for an “attention economy” framework to “explain how self-serving utility pursuits result in emergent value.” Here’s my 2 cents to it.

My favorite self-serving pursuits is to learn getting smarter about the increasingly complex range of possibilities I/we have for creating value. The complexity of match between opportunities and capabilities ti meet them is fueled by the concurrent differentiation of both. In this context, increasing my evolutionary fitness to benefit from our collective evolutionary fitness--or collective intelligence (CI)--seems a good personal strategy for maximizing utility.

Collective intellect augments individual

Scott Leslie wrote in his EdTechPost blog:

"Don't you just love when, in the process of thinking about an issue, you come to a question that you know others are looking at and that is more than you could handle yourself, and then the next minute you turn around and - lo and behold - you find exactly what you were looking for. I expect there's a name for this phenomenon, and I also expect someone will soon develop an explanation of why this phenomenon seems so applified within the blogosphere."

Well, a couple of years ago, I developed an explanation that I believe touches Scott's expectations. Here it is:

"Shared-attention" & attention ecology

Professor Pierre Levy wrote:

> Dear coach, I will be very interested by your advice about expanding attention bandwidth and - therefore - time. :-)

Let me start with the model that I developed a few years ago to help myself understanding what I'm talking about. The diagram below shows two perspectives on attention, that we could label as

Attention Managemnet on the left and Attention Ecology on the right.

(Click on the "Continue reading..." link below the diagram, if you want to get the rest of the story.)

Seed 4 a collab. inquiry into p.bandwidth

Augmenting our personal bandwidth, the elasticity of our attention, is one of the ways, in which we can contribute to augment our collective intelligence.

If that hypothesis is true, then any learning partnership of 2 or more people should be able to verify and validate it. The "collaborative inquiry" in the title of this entry is a suggestion/invitation to the verification of my hypethesis.

This conversation started with the following exchange:

Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 22:38
From: Pierre Lévy
To: George Por

Hi George,

I just read your message and it is almost 10 PM... (I'm still in my office in Ottawa...)
yes, I am still working on the project of designing the growth of the CI network. But the time that is left to me by my current business is not enough.

Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2003 17:26
Subject: attention ecology / shared attention
From: George Por
To: Pierre Lévy

Time pressure is an interesting thing. What I find interesting about it is the link that connects our experience of time and attention. When we're in "flow" attention, time flies fast, yet we don't notice it, and accomplish much.

The quality of our attention influences our experience of time not only when we're deliciously focused on a single, both very demanding and energizing task or project. It is also a decisive player in limiting or augmenting our capability to concurrently sustain several co-creative, multi-channel and multi-community conversations.