It has been hard to write of late. There is so much going on right now in terms of new social media experiences. My wife said it was so “cute” that I was just getting into Facebook now, after it had been open for 18 months already. I snapped back that it was really just opening up now. My spontaneous application promiscuity on its platform is embarrassing. I feel like a teenager with raging widget hormones.

It is a lot of work to express yourself uniquely online. You need to manage all of your various profiles across so many networks. Each network and engine represents a different source of traffic to your personal stream- Google, LinkedIn, WordPress, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Furthermore, they each provide different degrees of control over how your electronic likeness is distributed to others. In Media Futures speak, these are your various API’s (some which you control fully like your blog, others not at all like your PageRank) that together form your unique Algorithm identity in the online world.

This all makes sense, from the 30,000 feet perspective that I typically have written from in the intellectual capital that is New York City. But now that I meet with folks at Grove in the Marina instead of La Fortuna on West 71st street, I am both more engaged in the “real” world of Internet startups but also that much more conflicted by it.

While there are certain voices out here that call for radical transparency so as to keep any unsavory data mongers at bay, those same voices forever remain two cycles ahead of what gets funded and remain marginalized to watch as others commercialize their ideas from two cycles hence. The Internet is a data platform and therefore Internet businesses need to generate cash flow off of people’s data. This is the reality of the multi-billion dollar cookie cocoon that we are all clicking away within.

Still, regardless of how hopeful or hopeless the open Attention ecosystem proves to be, there are early traces of “mass market” Internet services paying Attention to Attention. For example, YouTube now enables me to “broadcast” what I am watching as a form of entertainment for others:

And LinkedIn now enables me to see who else has visited my profile

Granted these are small steps, but they are small steps by large players. Not to mention some truly open Attention thinking practiced by Google in both their Reader and Web History products that I will discuss in a coming post.