Attention Bottom-Feeders

And all you other little bitty blog fish swimming mightily upstream (and I’m right there, beside you), here’s something to consider next time you can’t stop obsessing over your lowly place in the blogosphere:

Blog authority as measured by Technorati is declining.

Welcome to the new “era of micromedia,” in which

Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses.

The DSM has all sorts of colorful names for this sort of behavior, but in web parlance, as Brian Solis at TechCrunch informs us:

Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) – an increasingly thinning state of focus.

So new metrics are in order, which means there’s a new race to the top. Let’s just hope we all don’t fry our brains in the process.