niche fadding

niche fadding. it’s a practice used to acquire attention.

Creating a strip of meaning around a niche, then using that as a kind of honey pot to attract attention.

In a world web where eyeballs are revenue, this can be performed once but goes on to indefinately provide income. A feed becomes a blog, which becomes a feed in a sidebar of another blog. Soon the density increases interconnectivity. With proper care, perpetual revenue machines can be built that run along while the creator is off, working on something new.

Toxickmuse saw this the other day and sent it to me:
http://movies.about.com/od/toppicks/tp/bunnies041006.htm

and a few days ago this made the front page of metafilter:
http://sport-people.blogspot.com/2007/04/funny-sport.html

Both of these are attempts to use niche attention to direct large amounts of attention through a monetized site. As I understand it, the attention economy appears to be one of the two secondary economies underlying the traditional concept of economy.

navigating memetic networks