New word of the day: Cleverage

It's a verb, of course, as well as a noun. Cleverage is a combination of "clever" and "leverage," and means to ensure the accomplishment of a small feat by an overabundance of small intelligence.

There is some background to this.

I saw a very good definition of "leverage" recently, which I had taken previously to be a synonym of the verb "use." A brokerage house information page defined the term to incorporate a power differential aspect.

To leverage something, or to use leverage, means to bring an extraordinary amount of some resource to bear in order to ensure the success of a task or a transaction. For example, raising a large amount of capital beyond one's ordinary means in order to buy a company is a leveraged buyout.

Where I had thought the once-dubious verb use of the term was appropriately something like "I am leveraging a paper towel to wipe up this spill," the finance-based definition of the term brought back the original sense of a physical mechanism that makes the term meaningful far beyond the "usage" sense, just as using a long pole to lift a heavy rock is leverage. The power of metaphor returned.

Or, going back to my own first experience of hearing "leverage" as a verb, using Visual Studio to write 25 lines of VBScript is an example of "leveraging Microsoft technologies".

On the attention and reputation economies, some attention-deficient scattered thoughts.

Reputation is related to trust, as modeled by IT geeks. Vilma Luoma-aho and David Nordfors wrote in "Innovation Journal" http://www.innovationjournalism.org/archive/injo-6-2.pdf that attention is necessary for reputation and so it is the work of "attention workers" to garner the attention of others in order to build reputations, presumably of some leviathan or other whose interests are served by attention workers. Attention, they claim, is a "scarce commodity" in the information age, because, as the now old saying goes, "information consumes attention (Herbert Simon)."

If reputation is also worthy of its own economy, doesn't that also suggest it has "reputation workers" building the reputations of others? Because reputation is not only the product of attention (despite Goebbels' assertion that there is no bad PR). A bad reputation cannot be the object of all the attention-gathering Luoma-aho and Nordfors write about. Note Bruce Sterling's remarks at http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/1-25/Note%2000002.txt

Finally, I have no idea who wrote this or what point they were trying to make. Don't make me have to read http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/one/the-reputation-economy/

Hopefully more later.

I need to post something. This originally was an e-mail to several people all of whom I expect will ignore it. If I am attentive I'll think and write a followup:

Some reading for interest in

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/06/12/for-the-lolz-4chan-is-hacking-the-attention-economy.html


background (some is video) on the m00t, 4chan, TED, attention economy, and other alternative non-monetary systems of equity and inequity thought of as "economies":

http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online.html

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/attention_economy_overview.php

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/one/the-reputation-economy/

http://boingboing.net/

http://www.innovationjournalism.org/archive/injo-6-2.pdf

http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/1-25/Note%2000002.txt

this all might explain why market share gaining importance, why attention deficit "disorder" must be combatted by the provision of salable cognitive enhancers. BTW I haven't had any coffee today.



...the joke here is that if you actually read all this then you are an attention gazillionaire. (Though I included it thinking parts of it might be an interesting read for you)



.. and the other joke is like the