Jeff wrote: First of all, “attention economy” ranks among the worst metaphors I’ve ever seen. Seriously, it’s awful.

It’s actually a pretty decent one if you know anything about economics. Economics is the social science that studies how society chooses to allocate its resources.

The Economics of attention concerns itself with how people and society allocate their attention.

Attention: we often ask people if we can have it, Antony of Shakespeare fame asked people to lend it to him, and out moms told us to pay more of it in class. Yep, sounds like a form of currency to me.

If you buy the premise from the Cluetrain Manifesto that “All Markets are Conversations” in addition to buying into the idea that the blogosphere is a global conversation, then the blogosphere is a global market of sorts.

The commodity being traded is information, and it is valued in terms of how much attention it gets. For example, highly valued blog posts get tons of comments, trackbacks, incoming links and email links. Those are our units of acocunt, but nobody’s settled on which is the universal measure of value in the blogosphere.

On a related note, whatever happened to that Asian Tsunami thing?