My friend Steve Gillmor, now with the AttentionTrust and GestureBank, has argued that "links are dead," in order to focus the conversation on how people use and pass information through their user interface.

The attention economy is one that is demand-driven. People in charge. This is an expression of the new digital populist rhetoric, part of a movement characterized by the notion that "the people formerly known as the audience" are now in charge. The people are in charge, but they always have been, as the history of anti-totalitarian governments has shown. The people always win, even in the midst of overwhelming oppression.

I've been an advocate of digital populist position, as well, because I do believe that people know what they want, much more than any individual company can guess. None of this is an attack on the attention promoters or populists. When balanced with the role of leaders, attention will provide a clearer picture of the changing world.

But to rely solely on attention data is to ignore the catalyst of change that reshapes markets, the exercise of human creativity called "innovation" when applied to people changing technology and "influence" when applied to the changing of other people's minds.

The influence economy is about people taking charge, shaping their community and leading movements of customers and citizens. We're not talking about monolithic media and machine politics, but grassroots communication enabled by simple tools and ubiquitous IP networks.

There is leadership everywhere on the edge of the network. If we focus only on attention now that the people are in charge, we attribute something to previous media that it really didn't possess: The power to mesmerize. People deserve a little more credit, they weren't duped by mass media--rather, they've been routing around it as best they can all along. Hyperlinks became a new medium (or place built of connections), because that is how folks act through connections to exert their influence on the world.

Getting feedback in the form of "attention data"--in other words the aggregated and anonymized records of what people actually look at on the Web--is a useful tool for gauging your success in engaging people's attention. It can tell you if the Web service you've created is a hit or a miss. It can tell you if your blog or newspaper is getting readers.

Influence is the lever that moves minds. It is topic-specific and fluid, changing over time and as subjects intersect and communities unite or divide. We believe influence analysis is the basis of a tremendous amount of value that, if measured, can improve our customers' marketing efforts and, soon, turn the many millions of new market leaders at the edges of the network revenue opportunities up to "High." I didn't say incentives weren't important before, only that you have to be able to measure the world before and after the incentives are introduced.

Influence analysis combined with attention provides a view to both the supply and demand sides of the market. BuzzLogic will eventually integrate attention data into its analysis, certainly, but we aimed at what we believe is the more important variable in communication, influence, which can turn markets up-side-down.

Jakob Nielsen recently wrote about participation inequality on Web sites earlier this week. His excellent discussion shows how, like the much-fetishized "long tail" does not apply only to creative works and products waiting for someone to come along and buy them, but also to the contributions by members of a community, whether to a discusssion or debate, a volunteer program or political participation:

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

* 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
* 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
* 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.

Wikipedia's contribution patterns show this in action, as have virtually every study on community dynamics, online or offline.

To understand influence we look at linking behavior, which is how people put information to use. They amend ideas with their own comments and a link to the source they are speaking about. Influence is like the local election, you make a difference by showing up. An individual's influence on one topic may be quite large because they participate in the conversation frequently (which is why mass media looked so influential when it was unchallenged by other media), but virtually nil on other topics to which they give only passing attention in their blog, site or magazine column.

To Jakob's point about participation inequality, you can dramatically change the representativeness of a discussion—and therefore get more useful information from the participants—by activating more participation. That's marketing's job in the context of selling stuff and services. In conversational media, the power really is in the people's hands, but marketers still need to focus their limited resources on connecting with the new influencers who are gaining and wielding that newfound power.