The Web is Distributed, Your Attention Shouldn’t Be

Let’s face it, nobody posts content to just one site anymore. You probably have a blog, a social network profile, you post videos on YouTube and you keep your pictures organized with Flickr. The people you want to touch, your audience, don’t come to your site anymore. They hang around in communities, so you have to get to them.

That’s why you probably post videos to YouTube, then embed them on your site. You don’t post them on your site or host them there. The simple fact that your videos are on YouTube gives you access to a great publishing platform and to a great potential audience. Here’s the problem we have with this approach.Just because the content is now distributed on a variety of sites, platforms, widgets and so on, that means your attention in handling conversations also has to be distributed.

You just got back from a cool trip and you want to blog about it. You upload the pics to Picasa or Flickr, Post some cool trip videos to YouTube.
Then you embed some of them in a blog post. Now everybody knows about the crazy fun you had on the trip. But if you want to see people’s reactions to your post, to your pics and videos, you have to visit Flickr and YouTube over and over again. Although the pictures, the videos and the blog post are connected by one main meaningful theme, you can’t see them all in one place. And you can’t see the way they are related.

This means that, just to keep track of the conversations you start, your attention is all over the place. That’s not very fun, you waste a lot of time and it’s hard to keep track with what’s being said. We believe that, since you are the creator of your content, you should be able to manage it properly. It’s your digital life, and in a sense, you’re now spending as much time managing it as you spend living it. As more and more ways to create, publish and remix appear, you’ll need a good way to manage all you create more and more.

Welcome to the future, where bits and pieces of your digital self are scattered all over the place. Don’t let them get lost, they are parts of you.