While Google has successfully made a media empire selling text ads, Adwords certainly is not the final word on network-based advertisement delivery innovation. Their auction system provides a price based on pseudo-semantic value, rather than the value of the audience viewing the ad. Expanding upon the earlier post on social capital, the web could provide media vendors with a way to price their ads not solely based on the demand for the specific outlet (or classification of venue) by advertisers, but by the value of the actual audience members. Never before has media been so freely distributed and users so easily tracked that this hypothetical situation could exist.

Since the cost of media delivery is so low, the value of publication is overshadowed by the value in garnering a user’s attention. The attention economy is a framework from which we can value this attention as a basic commodity within social media. Seth Goldstein, an entrepreneur behind AttentionTrust, believes that this metadata, which can take the form of a user’s clickstream history is not only valuable, but belongs to the user.

However, putting aside the issue of metadata ownership, AttentionTrust allows for the data to be shared with other web applications and web services. For instance, one company, BuzzLogic, allows clients to track “influence” in the world of social media. Similarly to theoretical valuations of social capital, BuzzLogic claims:

“The BuzzLogic system uses data gathered by its monitoring tools to deliver its social maps. Based on criteria determined by marketers themselves, BuzzLogic social maps chart the relevant relationships that evolve during blogging conversations to show influence and how it changes over time.”

As both clickstream and social relation data is accumulated for many users on the web, it is feasible to improve systems such as Adwords with far more advanced methods for advertisement valuations, based on the very ideals which make collaborative media valuable to the user.