The attention economy, attention to the economy!

Recently I listened to a lecture on a current phenomenon labeled "the attention economy". The idea basically is that anything linking a (person) profile to some content is valuable. It does not matter how trivial the linkage is when these bits and pieces are amassed by the million.

Some good examples of this are Second Life, social bookmarking applications, any Facebook application and for instance microblogging linked to geography.

Obviously this information is collected for commercial purposes mainly for more targeted advertisements.

As long as the profiles are all anonymous then the attention has an equal value. When the person is identified the value goes up (especially if you happen to be somebody). I wonder what this will do to privacy since the temptation to use the person instead of the profile will be stronger as more bang would be got out of the buck. The economy of the attention economy may have a really bad effect on privacy.

Learning to write

My son is learning to write. It must be a fascinating experience to fix some thoughts on paper for the first time.

I noticed that the output is a long string of characters - mostly consonants, sporadically vowels and no spacing between words. Is it so that he intuitively uses the signs that carry most information value first? Is this how the brain works?