John Gruber’s latest article “Attention is the real resource” struck a cord with me (as his articles often do). I especially love his last point…

A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.

This is a thoughtful variation on Fake Steve Job’s point about AT&T. The data issues on their mobile network are a sign that people want MORE of what they have to sell, rather than “excessive usage”.

I think the core problem is in mistaking a metric for a measure. In my mind a measure is some data you would base business decisions upon; while a metric is the real-world representation of that measure. In John’s example, attention would be the measure; while a pageview is the metric most use to (a-hem) measure their success.

I find this distinction useful in explaining to the PTB’s (power’s that be) why some actions are only good in the short term. Metrics are just a shadow of the true measure and are too easy to misrepresent when they are examined in a vacuum.