monkeynotions reports a funny IM conversation she had with a friend about eTech, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held last week in San Diego:

me: i spoke to a friend who just came back from eTech
me: he said almost everyone in the room had their laptop open
me: and no one was paying attention
me: he said there were even two guys who spent all their time on their laptop in the lobby
me: heh
my friend: wasn't this year's theme in eTech Attention Trust?
me: yah
me: hahah
me: which makes it even more ironic

These days the big word in technology marketing is attention, yet no one seems to be paying any. In her reporting on SXSW, Liz Lawley mentions a Herb Simon quote from the 1970s: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Liz notes you can pull up a bunch of interesting commentary on attention by searching on that phrase.

I've recently been trying out the feed reader BlogBridge as a way of managing my attention to the sites on the BlogHer Tech & Web blogroll. BlogBridge is a Java-based desktop newsreader. It includes a SmartFeed capability that allows you to do keyword search across your feed subscriptions. Some other feed readers offer this capability also; Barb Dybwad points out that NetNewsWire for the Mac has it. This is helpful when you're writing an article on a particular subject and want to see if anyone else wrote about it recently. I made a SmartFeed with "attention" and found Liz's post that way.

What tools and techniques do you use to manage your attention?