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.