About

The Attention Project, is a brand new online project by Mike Parker looking at the current attention economy and trying to carve out its own space.

First I’ll tell you a little bit about me, then I’ll explain a little more about the project.

I’m a 30 something web guy. I’ve tried to be a little more specific than that but I just couldn’t find a single pigeon hole to sit in. I can tell you where I work though, I’m a partner at Orange Bus, an innovative web design and digital strategy company. I’m a busy guy with a family, dogs and a great business to help run, and now this project too.

This Project

Working as a client focussed web company, we’re continually asked about SEO. In fact you can switch the term SEO for “Google”, because that’s always the focus. “How can you help us climb to the top of Google?”

I’d say that’s almost always the wrong question. Really their goal isn’t to be at the top of Google, their real goal is to attract and keep the attention of their target audience.

So instead of the focus being on Google, the focus should be on creating great content, delivering a great service, or plain and simply being remarkable. That’s what this project aims to look at, what steps can we take to deliver real value to our audience and how can we measure that.

Day 2: Dec 9 On my own again

So it’s day two of the attention project and as expected none of the three major search engines have yet to visit. Why would they? I haven’t told them I exist. Have you?

Just to make sure they don’t know about me, a quick search on my domain theattentionproject.com provides these results:

Google: Recognised the context of the search, and that by typing in the domain I was infact using the engine as a replacement for my browsers address bar.

Yahoo: Isn’t directly aware of me but I am within its index, albeit through another site which is monitoring new domain name registrations.

Microsoft: Again hasn’t visited. But unlike the other two has ignored the context of my search and has offered up 67 results.

Expect a post in the next few days on the topic of search engines, a simple overview of how they work and the importance of context.

We’re ready to get started. We’ve laid the foundations. We’ve created a simple site, with an even simpler design, and we’re on the internet. We’ve hooked up Google Analytics an incredible free web statistic tool, that will form the core of our web metrics toolbox.

I think its time to start to get the word out, and to begin building an audience.

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